To make something so beautiful, so tender out of something so tragic and heartbreaking takes a real skill. Hirokazu Koreeda has perfected it.

Not since Elephant Man has a film had this much of an emotional effect on me, it actually made me feel quite sick in my stomach in the last half hour and in the last 15 minutes or so I realised I was holding my breath.

The young actors have left me gobsmacked at how flawlessly they performed, they say very little but their every action makes you empathise with them that little bit more. Akira's scenes when he remembered how to behave like a child again were particularly touching but when the sucker punch comes, the…

Yuki: ''No, I'm gonna meet mommy at the station.''
Kyoko: ''She's not coming home today.''
Yuki: ''I'm sure she's coming home today.''

A fully realised vision of the resilience of children over the course of a year based on the 'Sugamo child-abandonment incident' from the late 1980's, in which a mother of four children to two different father's abandons them as she flits around like a sexual butterfly, sending them money intermittently to prove she 'cares'. Hirokazu Kore-eda proves once again the breadth of his talent as a storyteller by immersing us into the world of a quartet of children whose mother is a selfish cunt, and he does so with such a light touch and restraint from heavy-handed melodrama,…

A heartbreaking tale of abandonment and survival, Nobody Knows takes a more extreme view on the mistreatment of children; but it's one that remains grounded in reality, showing how neglect can take away a childhood in an instant and replace it with experiences that no child should be subjected to.

Nobody Knows opens with the family in question moving into a new apartment. Only the mother and Akira, the protagonist, are known about by the other residents and only Akira is allowed outside. Even though the mother acts irresponsible, having had the four children via four different men and not allowing them to go to school, the family are content and happy as they are shown eating dinner and playing…

I'll apologize beforehand in regards to what one will find themselves reading if it drives away from the film itself, but the moment a thought comes by when I want to talk about the impact of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Nobody Knows upon myself, I cannot help but tear up, and within a word I write about what has been captured here, and it affects me in a manner that almost felt so personal to myself. But before I start rambling, it is already hard enough trying to find where I should begin when I want to talk about Nobody Knows, one that I find so difficult to revisit because these feelings pain me so much. Whenever I come back towards my…

Realism is repetitive. Films made with a goal of realism are repetitive with this specific idea as an intent, and while I could never say that such a style is my preferred method of storytelling, Hirokazu Kore-eda consistently makes for one of the better cases for such a style from a modern director. I don't think it defies the statute that realist films never need to be as long as they are. Specifically, Nobody Knows is within the margin where it's very clearly longer than it needs to be, but not long enough that its length is part of the point.

The central debate is implemented fairly well throughout, that being the question of whether or not the mother of…