Grade: A-

Verdict: Yes, yes.

Details: Starring Wu Nienjen. Directed by Edward Yang. Not rated, but there are serious themes. In Hokkien and Mandarin with subtitles. Two hours, 53 minutes.

See it: Local theaters and showtimes for
Yi Yi

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Review: It's hard enough to sell a lot of people on the transcendent pleasures of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” But even the most sophisticated movie lovers may be a hard sell for Edward Yang's exquisite, almost three-hour film “Yi Yi.”

Yep, I'm telling you that a three-hour family drama with subtitles is not to be missed.

And you don't have to believe me. Take the word of the members of the Cannes Film Festival jury, who voted Yang best director. Or the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, which both voted it best foreign language film. Or the National Society of Film Critics, which voted it best picture of the year, period.

“Yi Yi” — the English title, “A One and a Two” is supposed to suggest the subtle rhythms of life, not Lawrence Welk — takes a panoramic view of an extended middle-class family living in Taipei, Taiwan. The players are the members of the Jian clan. Among them are the father, NJ (Wu Nienjen), who's having a midlife crisis thanks to trouble at work and the reappearance of an old love he hasn't seen for years; his wife, Min-Min (Elaine Jin), who goes into a spiritual tailspin after her elderly mother has a stroke and lapses into a coma; their children, teenage Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee), who blames herself for her grandmother's condition, and 8-year-old Yang-Yang (irresistible Jonathan Chang), who photographs the back of people's heads, telling them, “You can't see, so I help you.”

In a sense, that's what Yang does, too. He shows us what's always there that we can't always see — the profound consequences of a seemingly simple action or the myriad spasms of anxiety and epiphany that haunt our everyday moments.

“Yi Yi” combines emotional delicacy with a distinctive visual intensity. By keeping his camera deliberately distant from his characters, Yang emphasizes their humanity.

This is a deceptively simple film, one that discovers the epic intimacy and unexpected humor in such familiar passages as weddings and funerals, births and deaths.

It may seem long. It may seem ponderous. But by the time “Yi Yi” is over, you may begin to believe it wasn't long enough.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution