Popular reviews

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  Review by MahoganyDoors - luke ★★★★½ 5

  Anthony Shim said the camera's point of view is the father's... damn.

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  Review by charles ★★★★★

  where do i start? this is one of those movies where if you wanted to hate it, you couldnt. it’s not even one of those movies where it’s like “story good execution bad” it’s literally story good and then execution elevated it. 

  i cannot articulate how much i fucking appreciate representation so truly, thank you anthony shim for this wonderful and beautiful film. not only did the story capture me, the beauty and delicacy that you granted this movie made me feel like i truly was represented. while i personally knew my father for a bit, i didn’t know him that well and sometimes i would just cry when nothing was happening because i would just reflect on my life…

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  Review by Deathy ★★★★½ 1

  Score : 9.2/10 ✅

  You keep saying sorry, but you’re not sorry. You not sorry even a little bit.

  Easily one of the best movies of 2023 that I had the pleasure to watch and do you want to know what’s the frustrating part? How it’s casually slipping under everyone’s nose. Anthony Shim directed this movie with the highest form of the words: tenderness, authenticity, vulnerability, and self-discovery. It goes beyond the obvious and delivers an astonishing quiet, painful yet very rich Mother-son story.

  Living an immigrant lifestyle has never been so tenderly yet tragically captured. The struggle to adjust yourself to the normalized Canadian lifestyle is shockingly outrageous when you realize how small encounters substitute the young Dong-Hyun to…

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  Review by al pacino ★★★★½ 2

  holy shit that breakfast scene was so painful to watch.

  a story about loss, isolation, racism, family, growing up, identity, and so much more. all packed nicely in a simple setup between a mother and son. 

  this film is equal parts beautiful, warm, and loving as it was full of pain, sadness, and heartbreak. never has such a soft, inviting film hit me with such an extreme weight. once the credits started rolling, i was immobilized in my chair from the extreme range of emotions i had just been subjected to. 

  “mom, should we go back?”
   “we can’t.”

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  Review by The Oscar Expert ★★★★ 2

  A really beautiful ode to the sacrifices of immigrant mothers (and mothers in general) and the power of knowing your roots.

  The wide-angle, ever-drifting camera immerses us in every location and finds the beauty in every moment. Like in a Malick film (obvious influence), there’s a sense that there is something grander to these characters’ lives than they might notice. There’s also a good tinge of 90s nostalgia in the look of it. It occasionally misses opportunities to strengthen the drama by insisting on not cutting for the duration of every scene, but the style overall works wonders. 

  Some conflicts feel a tad melodramatic, it definitely wants to get you. But the film earned my tears in the end through…

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  Review by Frances Meh ★★★★

  Gutted, broken, weeping, and absolutely fucking starved for kimchi jjigae.

  
  
  

  
  ~ Reel Asian Film Festival Toronto ~

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  Review by Reyjohn ★★★½

  DO YOU KNOW TAEKWONDO 👊

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  Review by Lynn Betts ★★★★

  A contemplative slice-of-life film in the vein of MINARI about Korean immigrant life in the suburban and rural Canadian landscape. Beyond the themes of xenophobia and assimilation, there are many more struggles related simply to being lonely or uncertain in a world which is mundane underneath what we make of it.

  By objective standards, the mother has lived a very big life: growing up in Korean orphanages, working in a busy bar, falling in love with a soldier, who upon dying leaves her a single mother but not legally a widow, and their child ineligible for citizenship as he was born out of wedlock. I knew that the Catholic Church and religious outfits would at one time not baptize “illegitimate”…

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  Review by icebear ★★ 3

  I really don’t enjoy harping on Korean diaspora films, but when they regurgitate the same common representations of microaggressions seen throughout Asian American/Canadian films, they lose all meaning they once had. Riceboy Sleeps literally starts off with a lunchbox scene where David, our protagonist, gets bullied by the other kids for bringing gimbap. I honestly don’t know what the purpose of these scenes are anymore other than to gain sympathy from well-meaning white liberals.

  Having grown up in the same suburbs the film takes place in, I felt a little nonplussed. The neighborhood I grew up in was so deeply Asian that even the non-Asians shopped at the Chinese and Korean grocery stores. There were all sorts of Asian restaurants…

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  Review by Hank ★★★★ 6

  I cried when he put his dad's jacket on

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  Review by cecetang ★★★★★ 1

  I sobbed 10 mins into the movie and then never stopped

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  Review by Realkinoshit ★★★★

  This movie reminds me that I still haven't watched The Ballad of Narayama 😩 "Goryeojang" (the Korean version of The Ballad of Narayama) cleverly corresponds to the relationship between the terminally ill mother and her son in the film. I even thought the ending would be the son carrying his mother up the mountain to see his father's tombstone, and then the mother dying on the mountain 💀

  It's a pretty underrated coming-of-age immigrant story about Korean people once again. Every time I watch this type of movie, it makes me more fearful of studying abroad in the US. Like... why can't people just be nice and respectful to others who are different from them? Fuck racism man 😔