Minari

USA 2020

Dir: Lee Isaac Chung

115 mins (ends 9:25pm)

Cast: Steven Yeun, Han Yeri, Youn Yuh-jung

Rating: PG - Mild themes and coarse language

Writer-director Lee Isaac Chung has said, of his loose autobiographical film Minari, that he began by sketching out a series of small memories from his childhood. The film he has made is a testament to that experience, both the bitter and the sweet, of growing up in a Korean-American immigrant family in 80s America.

... This is not a story that pushes us for emotional investment, instead presenting us with the small incidences, both triumphant and banal, of everyday life. Yeun, now Oscar-nominated for his performance, has a hopeful boyishness about him, made all the more poignant for the way it is sometimes crumpled and made weary with late-night work and worry; he’s remarkable in the role.

Chung’s visual style is gentle and unobtrusive, with an eye for framing the most emotive scenes at a respectful distance, capturing the small things: mother and daughter sitting on the floor together in a difficult moment, or the beady-eyed glances from white children at church, who regard the Yi family with bald curiosity.

... Minari’s astute sense of belonging and unbelonging, poverty and the domestic struggles of family life, give it a quality that only the greatest movies have – a sense of both the specific and the allegorical, the unique details of human experience and also the vastness of it.

The love and tenacity holding the Yi family together, even in the face of despair, is profoundly moving, and I get the feeling that I will be replaying moments from Minari in my head for a long time. Lee Isaac Chung has made a film that will endure. 

Christina Newland, The Ipaper

It took four movies before Lee Isaac Chung was ready to tell the kind of story first-timers so often rush to share straight out of the gate. Not a coming-of-age movie so much as a deeply personal and lovingly poetic rendering of his Korean American childhood — specifically, how it felt for his immigrant family to adjust to life in small-town Arkansas — Minari benefits from the maturity and perspective Chung brings to the project. Waiting until his early 40s to make sense of memories from when he was 6, the year his grandmother came to live with them in the U.S., Chung transforms the specificity of his upbringing into something warm, tender and universal.

...  Minari invites us to care about this family, and by the end, we’re so deeply invested, he doesn’t need to embellish. As written — but even more importantly, as performed by an all-around terrific ensemble — the characters are easy to admire, and even easier to love. So, raise a glass of Mountain Dew to Chung’s achievement, and run, don’t walk, to Minari.

Peter Debruge, Variety