FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Aiden Melton The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Janis One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

losindiscretoscine Put aside a part of your clichés about Japan, the director Hirokazu Kore-eda immerses the viewer in the intimacy of three sisters whose personalities are way different. Their kindness leads them to welcome their half-sister whose existence was ignored by them. The photography, bright and refined, provides the movie with a goodwill whose secret is only kept by Japanese productions. Way more than a simple "feel good movie", "Our little sister" never falls into the pathos despite situations that would easily lend to it. Not dramatic nor a comedy, it's the movie's neutrality that is striking : scenes follow one after another without having a single impact on each other and yet, the camera's eye leads us to become infatuated with those four sisters that are learning to be happy together, each of them bounded by her own intrigue in the background. If the message can seem a little bit too bright, sometimes flirting with the gullible, we have no problem embracing this naivety, like during this beautiful biking scene where the blooming sakuras pass before our eyes. Full review on our blog Los Indiscretos : https://losindiscretos.org/english/our-little-sister-2015-hirokazu- koreeda/

maurice yacowar So why does Our Little Sister open with a shot of a woman's feet and pan up her bare legs to reveal her in bed with her lover, presumably naked under the blanket? This very sensual image is completely out of step with the film's quiet, meditative story of three sisters adopting the 13-year-old half-sister they meet at their father's funeral. The film pays a lot of attention to the women's legs and feet. The woman in bed is Yoshino, 22, who gives money to her wastrel lover, drinks heavily and has slept around. Later she prominently strips off her black stockings in the right foreground. All four sisters flash their legs in all the long and medium shots, an openness that contrasts to the scenes in which the traditional kimonos conceal their legs entirely. (In a culinary parallel to this movement away from tradition, all the chopstick eating scenes are joined by one scene where spoons are used for a curry.)In a scene of girlish mischief Chika,19, paints 13-year-old Suzu's toenails. Despite her youth, of the three senior sisters Chika has the healthiest and most stable affair, with the adventurous colleague at the sporting goods store. Despite having lost six toes to frostbite he is a full man, with the freest commitment both to his lover and life. The three sisters have been living in their grandmother's house since their mother abandoned them, their father having run off with his mistress (Suzu's mother). Nurse Sachi, 29, has been raising both sisters and takes the initiative in rescuing Suzu from having to live with her stepmother, their father's third wife, after his funeral. The father's death, Suzu's arrival and the tensions raised by their mother's callous visit force the sisters to confront their past and to take more conscious control over their lives. They become aware of how their parents' abandonment has been influencing their behaviour. After her lover dumps Yoshino she controls her instinct to please men at all costs, as if pleasing them would salve her irrational guilt for not having better pleased her father. Her new bank job with a compassionate male boss leads her to a new self-respect and responsibility. Young Suzu slips easily into her life with the sisters, her school, the co-ed soccer team, but she is unable to talk to her sisters about their father. Drunk and unconscious she calls her father an idiot. but through the family's experience is freed to express her suppressed anger at her mother's neglect. She begins to ease into a relationship with a class- and team-mate, in whom she first confides her reticence. Similarly the sober eldest sister, Sachi, reminded of the destructiveness and folly of her father's self-indulgence, refuses to join her paediatrician lover's move to America, despite his promise to divorce his unstable wife for her. Sachi will stay with her doubled responsibilities of guiding her sisters and serving her dying patients in the new palliative care ward.This cycle of life and death plays out against the seasons. There are shots of stunning autumnal glory. The harvesting of the plums and the mixed delights of plum swine recur in the narrative. In their make-up scene Sachi brings their mother a jug of their recent plum wine and the last jug of their grandmother's. Suzu's promising swain bicycles her through a tunnel of refulgent cherry blossoms. An old restaurant owner takes a dying woman for a last look at those blossoms —and offers to tell Suzu stories about her father. That dying woman is the sisters' mother surrogate. They have patronized her diner since their infancy. Bankrupted by her own brother's calling in a loan, the woman treasures the — now four — sisters as children she never had. Now dying, she finds ease in Sachi's hospital care and the attentions of the man who ran his own diner — and continues to serve her recipes. The surrogate mother's funeral provides an emotional climax in place of the complications their mother's death and funeral would have raised.In the last scene the four sisters leave that funeral to walk along the beach. They cavort together at the edge of the tide, still in their funeral blacks — but they don't take off their shoes. From all the film beach frolics we've watched we expect they would. Keeping on their shoes — even their heels — becomes an indication of their new self-knowledge, self-control and discipline. Legs, feet, they're an emblem of our grounding, the base on which we stand and move. The framing shots — naked legs and heels kept on at the beach — encapsulate the women's growth from the impulses of a sensual, unexamined life to the maturity of self-control and self- respect. The opening scene leads us to expect yet another story of sexual awakening. Instead we get what the sisters blossom into, the primacy of family connection and responsible, giving love.

Mintroll I was anxious about Suzu Hirose, one of the main actress appears in this film because she was young and has little experience about acting. So I am relieved that her natural action brought success to this movie.I love Japanese movie like this. Nothing big happens, but people's mind gradually and certainly changes. We can appreciate Japanese language in this film. On the other hand I feel it is difficult to carry it in other languages. Actually the subtitles does not mean what characters want to say. Anyway, the changes of distance between four sisters are sensitively described to their actions, emotions, and words. These delicate expression is one of the attractive point of Japanese film.

writers_reign It's not generally known that Anton Chekov wrote a sequel to - and better play than - his successful Three Sisters and the reason, of course, is that he didn't but if he HAD it would have been very much like this totally EXQUISITE film whose 128 minutes are far too short to allow the viewer to bask sufficiently in its perfection. After only about forty minutes I knew I wanted to watch it again and again. Once they have bestowed every Award available on this BEAUTIFUL movie they should then create a Special award, a one-off celebrating the laughter, tears, joy, melancholy and utter bliss that comprise Life, give it to this gem and then destroy it so that no other film can ever share it. This is a film you watch through a veil of gentle, warm, tears of joy, wallowing in the outstanding performances of the four sisters who share a home where making plum wine is a major event. I can't rule out the fact that I lack siblings of my own - and have never consciously felt a lack - coloured my view of three full sisters who invite the thirteen year-old daughter of their biological father and the woman for whom he deserted them and their mother to share the home in which they live alone. This is very much a film of small pleasures like preparing and eating meals together and is just as nourishing to the viewer. A gorgeous Faberge' egg of a movie. Watch it, please, I beg you.