Curator Watchlist
Yi Yi
A patient, expansive family drama that turns ordinary life into something luminous. It’s emotionally rich, formally precise, and rewards attention with deep empathy, visual invention, and cumulative resonance.
Curator Watchlist
A patient, expansive family drama that turns ordinary life into something luminous. It’s emotionally rich, formally precise, and rewards attention with deep empathy, visual invention, and cumulative resonance.
Where to watch: Buy
Wed · 2h 54m
Director: Edward Yang
Starring: Wu Nien-jen, Issey Ogata, Elaine Jin Yan-Ling
A Taipei family faces personal and moral uncertainty as everyday events test their relationships and sense of purpose.
Edward Yang
Wu Nien-jen, Issey Ogata, Elaine Jin Yan-Ling
A patient, expansive family drama that turns ordinary life into something luminous. It’s emotionally rich, formally precise, and rewards attention with deep empathy, visual invention, and cumulative resonance.
Yi Yi is one of cinema’s great works of observation: a family portrait that keeps widening until it feels like a portrait of life itself. Edward Yang finds drama in small gestures, missed connections, business meetings, school crushes, hospital corridors, and the private thoughts people rarely say aloud. The film is calm on the surface, but it’s constantly alive with feeling and intelligence.
What makes it extraordinary is how it balances intimacy and scale. Every character gets their own emotional weather, yet the film never loses sight of the larger currents of time, memory, regret, and renewal. Yang’s framing, use of reflections, and patient attention to faces and spaces give the movie a quiet visual poetry.
It’s a film that deepens with each revisit, not because it hides a puzzle, but because it understands how much of life only becomes visible in hindsight. Tender, humane, and devastatingly observant, it belongs in the highest tier of modern drama.
Dan Molloy · 8665 likes
“My uncle says we live three times as long since man invented movies.” “How can that be?” “It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life.”
coffee (5★) · 4563 likes
“I’m sorry Grandma. It wasn't that I didn't want to talk to you. I think about all the stuff I could tell you... You must already know. Otherwise, you wouldn't always tell me to 'Listen!' They all say you've gone away. But you didn't tell me where you went. I guess it's someplace you think I should know. But, Grandma, I know so little. Do you know what I want to do when I grow up? I want to tell
Karsten (5★) · 4441 likes
should be a mandatory viewing every 5 years, so much to learn from this. it’s impossible to see everything this has to offer off a single viewing so it only makes sense that it’ll be something i continue to revisit and rediscover. as far as i know this is the only movie about everything that pulls it off. all those reflection shots in the windows are unbelievable. see you again in 5 years!
davidehrlich (5★) · 4384 likes
Trying to indicate the scale of a movie so immense and full of life that it can’t possibly be described (only experienced), the British critic Nigel Andrews wrote that calling “‘Yi Yi’ a three-hour Taiwanese family drama is like calling ‘Citizen Kane’ a film about a newspaper.” It’s a clever line, but those who haven’t seen Edward Yang’s final masterpiece could easily mistake it for a cop-out. At a passing glance, it seems like the kind of thing someone in
Taylor Williams (4★) · 3510 likes
Dropping a star because I wanted more yang-yang
For its exquisite visual restraint, emotional understatement, and attention to longing in everyday spaces.
A foundational family drama about generational distance, duty, and the quiet ache of change.
For its epic patience, social observation, and deep empathy for youth and family life.
Shares the sense of life as memory, grief, and grace unfolding across generations.
A delicate study of family obligation, change, and the emotional cost of growing up.
A humane, quietly moving film about age, family, and the dignity of small journeys.
A restrained family drama that turns grief into a study of love, absence, and daily life.
For its moral complexity, domestic tension, and precise attention to family pressures.
An ensemble family drama that balances pain, humor, and revelation with remarkable compassion.
For its intimate observation of children navigating abandonment and responsibility.
A rigorous character study of repression, family influence, and emotional isolation.
Shares an interest in modern urban life, alienation, and the emotional distance of contemporary existence.
family dynamics, generational change, urban alienation, memory and reflection, mortality, coming of age, marriage and divorce, work and modern life
family drama, slow cinema, ensemble cast, urban Taipei, coming of age, midlife crisis, reflective visuals, existential, humanist, modern classic