But again, while the technique in After Life may always be naturalistic the content isn't, and not just because it's a fantasy about posthumous existence. The game is given away in the stories of the schoolgirl who first chooses a trip to Disneyland as her memory and of an older man who boasts about his extramarital sexual conquests. A young female interviewer delicately steers the girl toward a more individual memory while the cheating husband on his own ends up picking a domestic moment. When you hear these outcomes you realize that despite the seemingly objective technique, somebody--Kore-eda--is most definitely watching and judging and shaping, and what he's coming up with isn't very different from the liberal consensus of most blandly uplifting Hollywood movies. If Hollypeckerwoods remake After Life they'll no doubt use a pizzazzier technique but they won't have to change the attitudes nearly as much.

By comparison to almost any movie about children, Nobody Knows is so low-keyed that the soft attitude may be less obvious than in After Life. Kore-eda doesn't have to push because there's no question about what we'll feel for these kids. But after the third or fourth reprise of the plinky-plaintive music, I began to think that his approach sits right on that razor's edge between recognizable style and shtick. This thought was the gateway to feeling that his failure either to imagine the subject matter more thoroughly in a naturalistic vein or to tie it all up in a romance narrative seriously limits what he can accomplish with his technique.

You's performance as the thoughtless, simpering Keiko offers a good beginning for both naturalism and romance. We've seen selfish mothers feigned by Cher, Goldie Hawn, Susan Sarandon and the like, but the Hollywood diva is always looking for something in the nature of approval or sympathy. (Ironically, they can't play selfish mothers because they're too concerned about their public images.) With Keiko, Kore-eda suspends judgment to the extent that you can watch You's demonic infantilism without having your emotions distorted by your natural anger. Kore-eda doesn't get the full comedy out of the scenes in which Keiko tries to convince her grave, practical older children that they don't want to go to school, but he does enable us to see more than we might if we were confronted by such a personality in life or read about her in the newspaper.

Keiko may be seen coolly but You's line readings are highly stylized. At times she sounds like the witch in Hänsel und Gretel, a comic enchantress holding the children captive. You has been in only a few movies but she's more effective in this vein than that theatrical veteran Irene Worth as the grandmother in Lost in Yonkers. But although Akira holds things together as magically as a child in a fable, Kore-eda doesn't do anything with these possibilities.