The late Taiwanese master Edward Yang’s extraordinary Yi Yi is his final film and his best-known masterwork. The sprawling story follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral. Whether chronicling middle-aged father NJ’s tentative flirtations with an old flame or precocious young son Yang-Yang’s attempts at capturing reality with his beloved camera, the filmmaker deftly imbues every gorgeous frame with compassion and clarity. But no mere summary can truly capture the enormity of Yang’s achievement here, or his genius for creating a fully actualized urban environment populated by people with rich and complex inner lives, desires, and heartache. Through his painterly eye, character and environment are inseparable, and Yi Yi is Yang’s most exquisite city symphony—its subtitle, fittingly, A One and Two…—as well as the capstone of the Taiwanese New Wave. With his final statement, Yang’s place as the spiritual descendent of Yasujiro Ozu crystallized, and the late filmmaker’s stature in cinephile circles seems to grow with each passing year. This dazzling intimate epic is one of the undisputed masterworks of the twenty-first century.