Mark Di Giovanni’s review published on Letterboxd:
One of the crowning works of its decade, the late Edward Yang’s Yi Yi is transcending in its appreciation for life’s moments of simplicity. Yang’s acumen for the poetic duality of objective truth and identity is displayed through a flurry of virtually superimposed images, reflective surfaces that speak to the individual’s compartmentalized perspective. The adorable antics of the 8-year-old Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang) embody a transitional stage, his innocent shutterbug tendencies— mockingly labeled as “expensive avant-garde art” by a prick of a school teacher— hoping to shed light on that which we can’t see for ourselves, while his quasi-philosophical probing remains pending, his father NJ (Nianzhen Wu) not even pretending to have the answers for him. There are moments upon moments in Yi Yi that exhibit the tangled complexities of human life at just about every age, but Yang insists on sharing them with us through an unimposing grace, nearly devoid of manipulative techniques. There is one scene, however, where the director threatens to pull the rug out from under us, as Yang-Yang’s newfound curiosity for holding his breath underwater nearly wanders into the territory of high tragedy. But Yang slyly maneuvers away from such cop-outs— Yi Yi is a film about the perpetual ebbs and flows, not a cleverly arranged build-up towards some extraordinary crescendo.