After Life

"Part scripted, part documentary, the film brings up questions of reality and memory, forcing the audience to contemplate the question themselves….This description however gives only a hint of insight into the complexities and depth of “Afterlife,” a hilarious and moving account of moving on."

INDIEWIRE

"Profound questions are the substance of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s brilliant, humorous, transcendently compassionate film…’‘After Life’’ becomes a quiet, extraordinarily moving and sometimes funny meditation on the meaning and value of life. In its modest attitude about the ability of movies to replicate dreams, ’’After Life’’ is the opposite of bombastic Hollywood kitsch like ’’What Dreams May Come.’’...’‘After Life’’ has its own austere beauty in beautifully composed shots of silhouetted figures in bright doorways and other images that subtly portray the office as a metaphysical portal."

NEW YORK TIMES

"Hirokazu Kore-eda seamlessly synthesizes the creative visual imagery of feature film with the provocative honesty of the documentary to create the sublimely poignant and haunting After Life."

FILM REF

"Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life is a brilliant meditation on death and memory…Just as Kore-eda fuses documentary elements with a fictional narrative, we see over the course of the film how memories are distorted, improved on, and revised; and it is these subjectively constructed memories that the new arrivals value most…its unhurried pace and lack of melodrama, like its subject, may linger in the memory long afterwards."

SPOUT