The Critics Agree: OH LUCY! is “Nothing Less Than Transfixing”

The comedy/drama OH LUCY! opens this weekend at the AFS Cinema for a limited run. Atsuko Hirayanagi’s film has delighted audiences from Tokyo to Hollywood, and actress Shinobu Terajima is a delight as a middle-aged woman who pursues her dream of love across the vast Pacific Ocean. With Josh Hartnett as the apple of her eye and a wonderful supporting cast that includes Megan Mullally.

And for once the critics and audiences are near-unanimous in their praise, as the film has a rare 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Here are some of the gems:

“It’s a near-minor miracle that just about everything works in this emphatically modest comedy-drama… The writer-director Atsuko Hirayanagi isn’t selling a packaged idea about what it means to be human; she does something trickier and more honest here, merely by tracing the ordinary absurdities and agonies of one woman’s life.” – Manohla Dargis, New York Times

“Within the confines of this cross-cultural shaggy-dog tale, Hirayanagi locates both a sharp vein of absurdist comedy and a bitter, melancholy undertow.” – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

“Nothing here is wrapped up with a red ribbon the way it would be in an American film, studio made or otherwise. OH LUCY! has the guts to leave things messy and unkempt, just like life.” – Adam Graham, Detroit Free Press

“Hirayanagi has a way of gradually getting inside her characters that slowly renders them comprehensively known, intimately exposed and surprisingly surprising.” – Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune