A masterpiece. There's just so much substance to this film. It's an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family of individuals, who all learn their own meaningful truths about life as they take on everyday struggles. Each character is heartbreakingly human. They feel like real people, each with their own dreams, fears, emotions, and secrets. As a result, each moment of the film has a real weight to it, a tension that keeps the story engaging throughout its nearly three hour runtime.

And among many other things, this is a movie about movies - their power, their abilities, and their necessity. Many scenes are shot through glass doors, windows, or by reflection in a mirror, highlighting the fact that we are watching a film. Adding to the reflexive discourse created in Yi Yi, several of the characters tell us exactly what movies can do, and Yang shows us they speak the truth by accomplishing those things in the film itself.

If all movies were as good as this one, we would live not three times, but ten times longer than people before movies. Yi Yi manages to show us many, many things that we can't see on our own.