LastingAware The greatest movie ever!

Boobirt Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Clarissa Mora The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Christopher Galasso Every so often, a film is made that allows the viewer to take his or her own life and experiences into consideration while watching. After Life, a film about a place beyond death where the recently deceased are tasked with choosing a memory in which to spend the rest of eternity, is that kind of film. Shot in pseudo-documentary style with actors and non-actors alike, many of the film's characters spend a lot of time thinking about the best and worst times of their lives.Simple, almost beautifully drab visuals never pull from the movie's main focus, figuring out what experience had the most meaning in one's life. These stories are sometimes scripted and sometimes real memories told by real people, ranging from a fun trip to Disney Land to dancing as a little girl. The simplicity of this film won't knock your socks off with visual appeal, but the weight of its message will surely stick with you long after viewing, while you think about what memory you might choose to spend the rest of time reliving.

GyatsoLa A run down school, a seemingly random group of people conducting awkward interviews with new arrivals seems an odd way to look at the afterlife, but Kore-eda has created something really special with this film. He somehow makes an enormously unlikely scenario for purgatory - where the dead are asked to select the memory they wish to hold onto forever, and (most unlikely!), this is recreated by a ramshackle low budget film crew, and turns it into something profound and beautiful. The film is a truly remarkable ensemble effort - there are no real stars in this film (despite a beautiful minor part from that truly great actress, Kyoko Kagawa), even the most minor characters (including an adorable old lady in the throes of a mercifully pleasant dementia) are given their own time and space and are depicted wonderfully. Dull looking salarimen who struggle to find memories that are worth keeping are shown to have lives of real depth and quality. A schoolgirl is dissuaded from a clichéd remembrance of a nice day in Disneyland, and instead remembers a beautiful moment with her mother. A mouthy, sex obsessed older man is shown to be boastful simply as a way of hiding the real love he has for his daughter. The film is obviously open to all sorts of interpretations, but for what its worth it seems to me to be about the importance of those small moments of joy, of grace, that make life worth living. Interestingly, he implies that those moments don't necessarily have to have really happened - it is the memory that is important, not the reality. Just one moment of ecstasy is maybe just enough for a life worth living.The film sounds quirky and slow, and it is paced at the speed of life - slow, but all too fast at the end. But it is never less than engrossing and in the end, beautiful and moving. Kore- edas films are not disposable entertainment, they are real art of the type that will stay with you forever if you allow them to wash over you. Try it, you won't regret it.

akkoziol The premise of this movie is quite simple: If before you are allowed to pass into heaven you had to live out one memory from your life forever, what memory would it be? Sounds simple enough, but is it? The span and breadth of experiences we go through in our lives, the moments, the good, the bad, when we think about it, a lot of stuff happens to us so imagine having to review your whole life and find one time or memory of life that you had and make it the memory you take with you to heaven forever. What WOULD you choose? Not so easy after all, hm? Our characters find that they are only given about a week to go about this quite monumental task and this is where the story begins. We are introduced to our counselors at the so called way-station between earth and heaven who's job it is to help the dead along to heaven. We see the careful interplay between the young, the middle-aged, and the old play out in a very patient manner as each person is tasked with rifling through their memories with a little bit of help for those a bit ambiguous about their former lives. Some find the process quite hard while others are easily able to figure things out. As in real life, we begin to see the examination of life's principle tenet that who we are is really a summation of how we live. One thing I appreciated about this movie is that, other than the main actors, the wayfaring actors are just regular people with no acting skills and you just fall in love with their idiosyncrasies, quirks, and genuine reactions. You can very much imagine yourself in their shoes. This is a very simple movie that examines a very deep question. So simple, it's brilliant.

Paul Martin I saw After as part of the Hirokazu Kore-eda retrospective at the Melbourne International Film Festival. This film should be compulsory viewing for film students. It proves that a good story put together inventively is all it takes to produce a compelling film. With scarce resources and mostly non-professional actors, Kore-eda has ingeniously contrived an alternate reality, where people go at the time of death. No pearly gates, no angels, no hell-fire - just bureaucrats in government buildings (or so they seemed to this writer), processing the dead, and extracting from them their lives' fondest memories to be made into videos.This idea is almost comical, yet it works beautifully. Clearly there's a humorous element, but Kore-eda plays it matter-of-fact serious, almost like a documentary. For me it strongly recalls some of the early fiction films of Kieslowski (like Camera Buff) which evolved out of the documentary format. The film shares the beautifully raw aesthetics of Camera Buff and Blind Chance and with the latter's metaphysical exploration. Having seen at MIFF all but one of Kore-eda's films (Distance, which I plan to see on Tuesday), this is my favourite so far. But each of the films I have seen thus far are very different in content and style to each other. This film is both enjoyable and moving.