A gentle trance-out and the strangest Palme d'Or winner in a while.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives(ลุงบุญมีระลึกชาติ)
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Thailand, United Kingdom, France · 2010
1h 54m
Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Starring Sakda Kaewbuadee, Jenjira Pongpas, Thanapat Saisaymar, Natthakarn Aphaiwonk
Genre Comedy, Drama, Fantasy
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Suffering from kidney failure, Boonmee has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside. Contemplating the reasons for his illness, Boonmee treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave—the birthplace of his first life.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein
Uncle Boonmee is entrancing-and also, if you're not sufficiently steeped in its rhythms, narcotizing.
The magic of Uncle Boonmee is that it makes all viewers feel like the strange ones.
A work of unostentatious beauty and uncloying sweetness, at once sophisticated and artless, mysterious and matter-of-fact, cosmic and humble, it asks only a measure of Boonmeevian acceptance: The movie doesn't mean anything-it simply is.
What you see and hear always seems perfectly natural, even if you can't exactly say why. Who needs words when you have cinema?
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
Spirit, animal, and human worlds coexist in dreamy harmony in this remarkable drama.
Rolling Stone by Peter Travers
As Joe blurs the line between reality and the supernatural, his haunting and hypnotic film exerts a hold you don't want to break. It's a beauty.
Boxoffice Magazine by Richard Mowe
A whimsical essay about the final days of a villager suffering from kidney failure it is undoubtedly one of the filmmaker's most accessible works.
A moving, gently reassuring tale that softens the boundaries between humanity and nature, life and the afterlife.
Movieline by Stephanie Zacharek
If anything, Joe's sense of dream logic is more naturalistic than Lynch's, more grounded in the knowable world - as much, that is, as we can know about nature - and the luminous Uncle Boonmee is no exception.
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