Celine Song's debut film is a powerful metaphor for the two selves that exist within immigrants.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 18, 2024

In this extraordinary Academy Award-nominated film “Past Lives,” the Korean concept of inyeon is used to lead viewers into believing that Nora and Hae-sung are destined to be together – if not in this lifetime, then in the future.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 8, 2024

Never risking discomfort, Song flattens a real-life anecdote of any truly messy feelings, resulting in a tone poem quasi-romance that’s actually serene to a fault. It’s a good movie too chronically polite to achieve anything like greatness.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Mar 4, 2024

What a touching story. A very striking way to look at relationships and the ways that love lingers.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 19, 2023

Past Lives may be a weepie, but it’s a hyper-sophisticated one.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 11, 2023

Plaudits to the principal cast, who do a miraculous job of portraying inner conflict and ecstasy with the merest tilt of a head, or subtle shift of a shoulder.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 11, 2023

Song finds the political in the personal and avoids seeming indulgent or niche.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 8, 2023

The film’s great magic is the way it captures the beauty of lonely cities with a camera that seems to caress their geography.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 8, 2023

It’s barely believable that this is Song’s very first feature. Her film is simply sublime from start to finish.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 8, 2023

It is highly recommended as a touching and always subtle film about old memories, old friendships and contemporary realities.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 8, 2023

The performances are impossibly strong and awards-season ready. Anything other than a best actress Oscar nomination for Lee will be criminal.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 8, 2023

It is a film that embraces blended nationalities while acknowledging the pull of one’s earliest home. One leaves aware of unavoidable open-endedness but sated by a work that has achieved all its lofty ambitions.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 7, 2023

Past Lives isn’t quite the woozy, lovelorn drama that its trailers have sold... But it is an eloquent attempt to understand how our memories can end up turning other people into projection screens for our own, confused desires.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 7, 2023

That it’s exquisitely affecting and made with great precision and care is enough for now. No need to make a song and dance about it. Indeed, as Past Lives so deftly shows, you can have an excellent drama without any of the drama.

| Sep 7, 2023

It’s a must-see.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 6, 2023

Past Lives is naggingly unsatisfying: the characters are not fully realised, and nor is their story. The film anticipates an impact it doesn’t earn.

| Sep 5, 2023

A transcendent debut for South Korean-Canadian filmmaker Celine Song, this romantic drama is a masterclass in slow, simmering storytelling. It will stay with you, maybe even into your next life.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 5, 2023

Past Lives is schematic but effective; what makes it work are the performances by Greta Lee and Teo Yoo as these star-crossed not-quite lovers’ adolescent and adult incarnations.

| Jul 21, 2023

The tug of Past Lives is situated in the many moments that come together to shape the film into a meaningful whole about love—lost and found, abandoned and claimed.

| Jul 17, 2023

Past Lives is lovely—smart, deeply felt, carefully observed, pleasingly patient with its characters and their emotions.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 28, 2023