Rarely has a kid's-eye view of the adult world been captured with such innocence and insight.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 1, 2006

The rare film that successfully tells its tale of childhood from the children's point of view.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 23, 2005

At its heart, Nobody Knows is a sweet salute to the tenacity and courage of children who are blithely mistreated by adults who should know better and probably do.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 18, 2005

This gem from Hirokazu Kore-eda unfolds with the graceful simplicity of a real-life episode turned into a minimalist fable.

| Original Score: A | Mar 17, 2005

Profoundly sad, but it's made with such artistry that it's almost uplifting; you watch it mesmerized, immersed in the strange community the children create.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 11, 2005

Kore-eda has an astonishing talent for making us feel the same emotional aches as the kids.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 4, 2005

It's a quietly powerful work, pulsing with gentle humor and a gripping sense of imminent calamity and dread.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 3, 2005

Kore-eda balances a visually gritty realism -- the film itself has an almost palpably grainy look -- with unexpected lyrical notes.

| Feb 25, 2005

It should come as no surprise that teenage actor Yagira won the acting prize at the Cannes film festival last year. Watching him, you'll feel like handing him the trophy yourself.

| Feb 24, 2005

One of those rare, unexpected movies that gets to you in a way you've never been gotten to before. Never mind tears. It leaves you with a stunned heart.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Feb 24, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 19, 2005

Hirokazu Kore-eda has made a film that's almost physically painful to watch. Spare and elegant and harrowing, it's an ode to childhood trust being stretched until it snaps.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 18, 2005

Kore-eda is the most gifted of the young Japanese directors.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 18, 2005

The film, winsome and tragic at once and finely attuned to the rhythms of childhood, always seems quite close to real life.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 18, 2005

The film's extraordinary power derives from the filmmaker's restraint. Kore-eda is less interested in the obvious moral delinquency behind the incident than in the lives of the children who are condemned to survive it.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 18, 2005

Kore-eda's filmmaking is austere and deliberate, yet his humanism is manifest in every frame.

| Feb 17, 2005

Takes us on a journey into the special domain of childhood, a voyage joyous, shattering -- and supremely convincing.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 17, 2005

Unfolds with such leisurely, terrible beauty, it takes a while to realize that what we are witnessing is the children's long slide into beggary, exacerbated by the slow torture of faint hope.

| Feb 10, 2005

The trouble is that with its lengthy running time Nobody Knows becomes grueling and drawn-out.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Feb 10, 2005

I certainly came out of Nobody Knows feeling numb; only later, reflecting on the fact that the movie was inspired by a true story, did it occur to me that the numbness could have been deliberate, and that what suffused this picture was a mist of anger.

Full Review | Feb 8, 2005