David Canfield

In Ewing’s hands and as anchored by two superb performances, Iván and Gerardo’s romance gets scaled up to an epic, a searing saga of the undocumented experience in which love is the binding force.

It’s brainy, sure, but the emotional experience is what’s most vivid. The plot beats may confound you, but the feelings behind them are crystal-clear.

Minari works quietly and methodically, embracing its lush rural setting with striking glimpses of its characters, alone against vast and empty landscapes. Chung’s directing feels drawn from memory, the scattered and sparkling quality of recollections, carefully assembled. It’s perhaps why every second rings so true.

The plot, admittedly, is scattered; this is par for the course for Decker, but in a movie with more conventional bones, the shagginess sticks out. Shirley gorgeously invokes its subject’s style, however, via a disarmingly off-kilter score; handheld camerawork that gets intimate with characters’ psyches; and, most strikingly, a series of unforgettable images that intensify this study of female awakening and decay.

You sense Simien’s pushing into uncharted territory. Yet his distinctive gifts as a director are increasingly relegated to the margins, propelling a narrative that works better in theory than execution.