By comparison, Gabriele Salvatores's I'm Not Scared, which I think was the best movie that opened in the United States last year, expertly makes use of the elements of naturalism and romance in conjunction. I'm Not Scared more shrewdly begins by showing that children are very much prey to vice and then has the little boy protagonist lift himself above the vices of both his playmates and of all the adults around them by making a heroic effort to save a kidnaping victim. The movie is charged with naturalistic detail about brutally limited rural life, but it ideas about moral development in children become operative by means of the romance narrative.

In Nobody Knows, Kore-eda's technique tells you that nobody's watching these kids but you're always aware of the director's sympathy behind his aesthetically disciplined gaze. It's that sympathy that returns and so gives meaning to Yuki's uncomprehendingly pained eyes. Unfortunately, Kore-eda's sympathy is less interesting than the situation that he has transformed to generate that sympathy. (The movie is based on an actual 1988 incident in Tokyo, but Kore-eda admits to IndieWire that the movie is "almost entirely fiction.")

Something similar happens in Kore-eda's After Life (1999), the ingenious premise of which is that the dead are allowed to take a single memory with them to the next world. To determine which memory they'll keep, bureaucrats spend a week interviewing them; once the memory is selected a recreation is filmed that will play in place of the living memory of the actual event. It's not at all a cynical vision: the bureaucrats, dead men and women themselves, are competent and sensitive. With an easy prospect, like the old woman Kimiko Tatara, they may get right to her memory of a formal dance she performed for her adored older brother. A tougher prospect may have to view years and years of videotaped experience before making a decision. (Anyone who can't, or refuses to, select a memory becomes an interviewer.)

In After Life Kore-eda's technique is subjected to the rigors of the premise--the interviewers work against a deadline and each character presents a plot arc with a pre-defined endpoint. At its best moments the premise is also purified by the technique. The scene in which the old lady teaches the dance to the little girl playing her at the age she was at the time, or of a man's flight on a biplane, are both "nifty" and amazingly unforced. When his instincts are just right, Kore-eda has both the perfect technique and the perfect touch for suggesting (without explicitly defining) the immanence of human experience.