I Was A Simple Man is layered and reveals a lot more as the movie progresses, and there is so much to unpack.

| Jul 20, 2023

Two features in, Yogi’s still expanding his emotional and stylistic range for something that’s more often hypnotic than clumsy.

| Nov 28, 2022

Yogi turns something personal into a uniquely ethereal look at mortality, repression, and reckoning with the sins of your past. But it’s the perspective that’s distinct. Yogi tells the bulk of his story through the mind of a dying man.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 17, 2022

Yogi, with his second film, prefers poetic monologues, but strikes a balance between mood piece and character study.

| May 4, 2022

While it wont be for everyone, there is a richness in the films texture that suggests so much while presenting so little.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 10, 2022

Paradise isnt always beautiful. Theres suffering, oppression, displacement, and erasure. Sometimes its truly haunting and terrifying, but in the end, it is still a home.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Mar 7, 2022

Honest enough to deserve a peek.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 26, 2022

A stirring, melancholic portrait of an ailing, elderly patriarch grappling with his encroaching mortality.

| Dec 3, 2021

Endearing arthouse ghost story.

| Original Score: B | Nov 21, 2021

A 100-minute spell of beauty and melancholy, intimate and grand in equal measure.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 19, 2021

The film's quietly uncanny narrative wondrously depicts not only a dying man's reflection on his life, but also the very nature of Hawaii itself.

| Nov 15, 2021

The result is a wildly contradictory affair whose unresolved ideas find as little purchase as it sojourns across time.

| Jun 5, 2021

Christopher Makoto Yogi's elegiac family drama crafts a haunting tapestry of a man's life, interwoven with Hawaii's own post-colonial landscape.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Mar 9, 2021

The natural milieu of Oahu establishes the contemplative mood, but what sets the film apart is its depiction of disability, as Masao's life progresses inward while the rest of the world moves along without him.

| Feb 19, 2021

"I Was A Simple Man" connects both as a homage to Hawaii and cycling through a man's life as he makes peace with certain death.

| Feb 13, 2021

I Was a Simple Man is a beautifully assembled and yet malnourished film that is notable for its tranquil beauty and its singular views on mortality. However, the characters are too one-dimensional for it to truly make a substantial impact.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Feb 11, 2021

Stirring.

| Feb 7, 2021

Yogi creates a cinema that is simultaneously meticulously physical and wildly metaphysical, offering passionate dramatic correlates and symbols for the unrepresentable-for the subjective experience of death.

| Feb 2, 2021

I Was a Simple Man, for viewers who can connect, is a satisfying look at both the history of a man and beautiful, under-appreciated land.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Feb 2, 2021

...uniquely metaphysical, devastating and beautiful.

| Feb 2, 2021