Still Walking

Despite recycling potential clichés — the grouchy elderly father, the disenfranchised second son — Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda imbues his seventh feature film with such specificity, tactility and humanity that yet another movie about a dysfunctional family reunion becomes a cinematic tone poem. The central source of the Yokoyama family’s internal combustion — and the reason for their gathering — is the loss of the eldest son, Junpei, who died 15 years earlier. Koreeda crafts the Yokoyama family elders as stubborn, petty and harsh. Patriarch Kyohei (Yoshio Harada) is an embittered retiree who reads the newspaper at the dinner table, only to inject an occasional sidelong insult under his breath. Grandma Toshiko (Kirin Kiki) isn’t any softer. Her passive-aggressive cruel streak, initially cute, grows darker and festers, eventually providing the film with its biggest maleficent jolt: “I’m not cruel,” she tells her son, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), the unfortunate adult child at the center of this bubbling-over family conflict. “It’s normal.”