LOVE, LOVE, LOVE THIS TRULY TRANSCENDENT FILM!

It's beautiful in every conceivable way...one of 2021's best films...Allow me to make a radical suggestion: The one film that demands to be seen on a big screen this year is a tiny little three-hour Japanese drama about grief, love and Chekhov... Hamaguchi is adept in character study, his films unfolding as if they were novels, totally consuming...For a century and more, film directors have explored crosscurrents between art and life, and how one informs the other. Hamaguchi makes that exploration a fully humanized one...It feels as expansive as the whole world...There is a deep richness to the film, especially in Y?suke's emotional journey, and Hamaguchi does an excellent job of letting his characters' secrets unfold naturally...A testament to art as something that's essential - rather than a frivolous activity for those who have money, 'taste,' or time...An incredibly subtle example of cinematic virtuosity and poetry... Watching this film provided me with three of the most spellbinding hours that I spent watching movies this year, including a mesmerizing 40 minute pre-credits sequence...The film firmly establishes its lonely and wounded characters, its melancholy tone, and its empathetic philosophy of the lost finding connections with each other...Moments bloom into radiant life...With Drive My Car, Ry?suke Hamaguchi crafts an emotional epic. It's a road movie through the soul and an odyssey well worth taking. You'll feel transformed by the journey's end... For many of us who may feel like we've stalled in our own great loss. Discovering Drive My Car may just give you the power to propel forward once more. A remarkable work that will stick with me for some time yet...What begins as a shuttle between home and rehearsal spaces ends up taking the pair across Japan and on a journey through memory and loss...Drive My Car is a rich and wonderfully soothing work, a film that only further confirms Hamaguchi as one of the finest directors working today...Drive My Car is an evocative display of our capacity for empathy, our need for change, and the catharsis of art and creation...the film captivates with thought provoking parallels between art and life and reveals the characters' existential anguish with a quiet poignancy...At the simplest of its many intricate levels, Ry?suke Hamaguchi's "Drive My Car" is a masterpiece - haunting and true, melancholy and wise - inspired by another...a fascinating, multi-layered metaphor for power dynamics -- between driver and passenger, to be sure, but also between director and actor, play and performer, writer and text... a multilayered study of redemption and reinvention through art...a masterpiece, a mysteriously enthralling creation that keeps you guessing about where it's going, then reveals its essence with astonishing clarity ...Drive My Car devastates and comforts through its vehicular poetry of the sorrow from which we run, the collisions that awaken us, and the healing gained from every bump in the road... An emotionally compelling titan centered on loss, regret, betrayal, sex, and guilt...Drive My Car effectively captures the double-edged nature of storytelling as a means of both processing and deflecting emotions...The impeccable Drive My Car cuts close to the bone of romantic and familial relationships and the fraught issue of trust and betrayal...A meditative, profound and engrossing journey...Few recent films have demanded to be seen in a cinema as much as this Japanese heartbreaker...Like a master craftsman gradually constructing his masterpiece. Drive My Car is an enthralling piece of cinematic wonderment...Head-spinning in its psychological scope and dramatic sweep...It's incredible and incredibly rewarding...A poised culmination of Hamaguchi's previous experimentations with form and style, this masterpiece marks the pinnacle of his career and cements his status as one of the most brilliant auteurs of contemporary world cinema...Drive My Car isn't just splendid cinema, it's a bastion of possibility and wonder...an accumulation of moments compounding moments, an eventual heart-aching avalanche of miniature emotional stakes finding force though one another...Ryusuke Hamaguchi's absorbing, epic three-hour drama finds a unique, affecting throughline to examine the crushing power of conflicted grief...A melancholy meditation of pain and performance that remains ever-enthralling...A perfect amalgamation of mood and meditation...this is as patient and sensuous as movies get...The film is ultimately about two people who saved each other from their own guilt, and these two actors embody that beautifully... a beguiling, slow-burning blast...Drive My Car's screenplay is an achievement to be experienced, an imaginative act of adaptation...Hamaguchi has made a profoundly beautiful film about making peace with the role in front of you, and playing it with all your might...Thinking about Drive My Car is necessarily reaching the gaze that does not individualize, that does not fragment, but unifies, that embraces a sensation more than an image...an engrossing and exalting experience...An absorbing, technically assured piece of work with poetic depths and novelistic ambitions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BPKPb_RTwI