Critic Reviews

The most beautiful thing in this film needs to be felt with the heart through Kore-eda’s augmented visuals, sound, and use of metaphors. It seems like love is the one element that could tie a family together in the director’s films.

It’s perhaps not his finest outing — the story seems to lose its way a bit in the final act — but even second-rate Kore-eda is still a fascinating journey.

What [Kore-eda] offers is a new way to rethink holding our grief, and the end result is a slight and wistful poem of a movie.

A beautiful yet simple story about using AI to manage grief, Sheep in the Box hits all the right emotional notes. The script glides through all stages with realism and curiosity in a way that never judges its characters, no matter which side of the AI argument they sit on.

Koreeda doesn’t have it in him to make an alarmist dystopian tale, and Sheep in the Box remains tender and sun-dappled as it eventually steers its main human characters toward healing.

Sheep in the Box is less concerned with feelings than it is with our impulse to elide them.

Even a lesser Kore-eda is still at least interesting, even frequently insightful, about the ways that we move through a world of pain and loss. It’s just a shame that, for a film that’s ultimately about the power of imagination and our ability to tell stories as a way of enduring, this one was unable to dream bigger.

Kore-eda’s animating curiosity makes his latest feature more compelling than not, but you’ll still have to make your own leap of faith in order to accept the movie’s limited terms and conditions.

The Japanese director has no shortage of ideas — chief among them the potential for advanced robotics to bring closure to the bereaved. But too few of those ideas yield satisfying conclusions, resulting in a drama that becomes treacly and insubstantial, reaching for a profundity that remains elusive.

There are luminous glimmers of promise scattered throughout “Sheep in the Box,” and each speaks to a filmmaker of immense creativity and thoughtful sensibilities—unfortunately, those glimmers amount to a disappointingly disorienting feature.