Kore-eda’s Cannes Entry Got Three Minutes of Applause, and That’s Not the Compliment It Sounds Like

At a festival where nine-minute standing ovations have become performance art — the audience clapping not because they’re moved but because the cameras are still rolling and no one wants to be the first to sit — three minutes for Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Sheep in the Box is the Cannes equivalent of a polite nod across a dinner party. Mixed reviews are already circulating. The ovation math just confirms what the critics are saying out loud.

Kore-eda is one of the great humanist filmmakers working, full stop. Shoplifters won the Palme. Nobody Knows is devastating. Still Walking is a masterclass in the quiet accumulation of family grief. But he’s also been on a run of international co-productions — The Truth, Broker, Monster — where the results have been increasingly uneven, as if the specificity that made his Japanese-language films so piercing gets diluted when the production apparatus scales up. The worry with each new one is the same: is this Kore-eda operating at full capacity, or Kore-eda being deployed as a prestige brand?

A weak Cannes reception doesn’t erase a career. But it does raise the question of whether the festival circuit itself has become a comfort zone that no longer pushes him. The best Kore-eda films feel like they were made in defiance of what the market wanted. The recent ones feel like they were made with the market’s permission.