ChicDragon It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Scotty Burke It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

pat_batman Textures. The Layering of scenes. Density with purpose. Filling a shot to the brim with material, lines, shapes, forms, movement. Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Café Lumière is a triumphant lense into the cramped spaces of contemporary Japanese life, albeit through the dispassionate, voyeuristic lens of a Taiwanese man. Scenes evoke the visually dense interiors of Yasujirō Ozu films such as Tokyo Story (1957) or his "Seasons" series; who Hsiao-Hsien acknowledged he was paying homage to.Japanese cinema stalwart Tadanobu Asano as Hajime offsets Yo Hitoto as Yoko, a youthful writer, pregnant amidst concerns from her parents about her professional and marital life; or the expectations of adulthood juxtaposed by the groaning of an older generation, an oft used theme in Ozu's work. Meanwhile her quest to learn more of Jiang Wen-Ye, a Taiwanese Composer, for a new book she's researching takes her through the intricate landscape of modern Japan. Asano provides interludes of stunning earnest, as the shop owner-cum-audiophile who records the numerous metro trains with his portable boom mic. His sporadic appearances and interactions with Yoko have a realistic rhythm to them, a sort of awkward warmness that permeates throughout the film, as they search for information on Wen-Ye.Familiarity with Ozu helps contextualise the film for its broader themes, but the focus and poise of Hsiao-Hsien is distinct and his foreign eye catches much of the unsaid, unheralded beauty of the moment. As the final images of trains intersect and Hajime is slowly recording the whirring cacophony of passing engines, we realise that life is to be lived; by recognising the moment and enjoying the visceral, audible, vibrations of the myriad means of existence around us.--Rave Silo

theskulI42 Its' Asian location, slow, languid pace and free-form story of distant people brought to my mind hesitant, negative thoughts of What Time is It There? and Tony Takitani, but while I struggled to keep my attention on the screen and lost interest several times in those films, this film, for whatever reason, managed to envelop me its in languidity(?).The outdoor scenes have the ambient noise of life that I just love, and when they do have to be inside, it's primarily on trains or in book stores, and the fact that I love riding on trains and light rails, and love the atmosphere of libraries and book stores doesn't hurt either.The film got me on a personal level and never seemed to linger too long on any scene, with each scene going on as a page in the book of a life, without seeming like I just wasted eight minutes watching someone sit in a car, or multiple scenes of a man peeing in a bottle (looking at you on both counts, What Time is it There?); I was just never encouraged to let my mind wander.I hear this is an homage to Ozu, but other than the compositions at the dinner table, I really don't see it. Hou moves his camera more in the opening scene than Ozu did in his entire CAREER (to wit, I've seen seven Ozu films, and in those seven films, he's moved his camera ONCE (in Tokyo Story, and it's so jarring I can't even articulate it.)) The "story" is hardly notable, because there really isn't any. You're not given the facts outright, there's no one to come in and fill in all the exposition that the characters already know unsaid, and there's really nothing that needs expositing...it's almost wholly like falling a not-particularly-notable individual around her quiet days. We can't all be Jason Bourne, and sometimes, you'd rather just hang out at the bookstore.I was underwhelmed by Hsiao-Hsien's The Puppetmaster in a similar way to the other two films mentioned, but this? You have earned yourself a reprieve, Hou, because I really enjoyed this. (Grade: A-)

Roland E. Zwick A Japanese movie with a French title, "Café Lumiere" is a desultory tale of a young pregnant woman and her friendship with a local bookstore proprietor. As the movie is almost militantly anti-narrative in its stance, there really isn't much more one can provide in the way of helpful plot summary than that.Director Hsiao-hsien Hou has opted for a Spartan style of film-making that hearkens back to such early Japanese masters as Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. Each scene consists of a single medium or long shot with no close-ups or edits whatsoever. The result is that we become so detached from the characters on screen that we find ourselves unengaged in their problems and their fates. And this turns out to be a particularly serious problem in this case because the spare screenplay offers us so little of interest to start with. The story consists mainly of Yoko wandering around the city or moping in her apartment as she goes about the tasks of her daily life. She rides on trains, entertains her visiting parents, spends infrequent moments with her storeowner friend - and that's about it: no revelatory conversations, no insights into character, no point or purpose beyond the prosaic surface. Admittedly, some of the compositions are stunning and the style is intriguing and hypnotic at first, but it soon loses its charm as the tedium of the narrative (or non-narrative) takes over.The acting is consistently understated and naturalistic, but in a movie in which everybody just looks preoccupied and pensive, there really isn't much call for anything else.

Ed Uyeshima I am a relative latecomer to the transcendent work of film auteur Yasujiro Ozu, whose masterfully understated views of Japanese life, especially in the post-WWII era, illuminate universal truths. Having now seen several of his landmark films such as 1949's "Late Spring" and 1953's "Tokyo Story", I am convinced that Ozu had a particularly idiosyncratic gift of conveying the range of feelings arising from intergenerational conflict through elliptical narratives and subtle imagery. It is Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's keen aspiration to pay homage to Ozu on his centenary with this generally enervating 2003 film. Among with co-screenwriter T'ien-wen Chu, Hsiao-hsien appears to get the visuals right but does not capture the requisite emotional weight that would have made the glacial pacing tolerable.The story concerns Yôko, a young Japanese writer researching the life of mid-20th century Taiwanese composer Jiang Wen-Ye in Tokyo after coming back from Taiwan where she taught Japanese. After 25 drawn-out minutes of character set-up, she reveals to her father and stepmother that she is pregnant by one of her students in Taiwan. At the same time, Yôko's coffeehouse friend Hajime, who runs a used bookstore, has an obsession for trains and seems likely to be in love with her. Hsiao-hsien connects this slim plot line with a series of shots held for inordinately lengthy takes as the frame composition changes. There are also long stretches of silence as well as an abundance of scenes featuring trains. While these techniques are consistent with Ozu's style, Hsiao-hsien cannot seem to dive into the characters' psyches the way Ozu did with maximal fluidity and minimal theatrics, in particular, Yôko's plight seems rather non-committal in the scheme of the drama presented and her parents' reaction overly passive to hold much interest. In fact, the whole film has an atmosphere of exhaustion about it, which makes the film feel interminable.The performances are unobtrusive though hardly memorable. J-pop music star Yo Hitoto brings a natural ease to Yôko, while Tadanobu Asano is something of a cipher as Hajime. The rest of the characters barely register, even Nenji Kobayashi and Kimiko Yo as Yôko's parents. Cinematographer Lee Ping-Bing provides expert work though he violates a cardinal rule of Ozu films by not keeping the camera stable during shots. Hitoto speak-sings the fetching pop song used over he ending credits, "Hito-Shian". The DVD includes an hour long, French-made documentary, "Métro Lumière", which actually does help provide some of the context for Hsiao-hsien's approach to the film. It includes excerpts from Ozu's films, in particular, "Equinox Flower", to show the parallels with this film though surprisingly no mention of either "Tokyo Story" or "Early Summer", the obvious basis for some of the scenes and situation set-ups. There are also edited interview clips of Hitoto, Asano and Hsiao-hsien, as well as the film's trailer.