Avis Metacritic

Though different in feeling from the Japanese writer-director's perceptive family tales like After the Storm, it has the same clarity of thought and precision of image as his very best work.

The Third Murder is a captivating puzzle.

Kore-Eda, writer, director and editor, an auteur in the full sense of the word, tunes his approach to the genre, but only up to a certain point.

In The Third Murder, as in his other films, Hirokazu Kore-eda informs tragedy with a distinctive kind of qualified humor that's realistic of how people process atrocity.

The Third Murder may not be Kore-eda’s best work, but the film proves a satisfying challenge, a complex exploration of sin and righteousness in an amoral world.

Technically splendid but emotionally distant, The Third Murder will seem more like a detour than a destination for his fans.

Kore-eda has unquestionably added a new, intriguing angle to his meditation on family life in contemporary Japan.

A harsh and largely unwelcome change of pace from Japan’s greatest living humanist filmmaker, The Third Murder finds Hirokazu Kore-eda abandoning the warmth of his recent family dramas (“Still Walking,” “After the Storm”) in favor of an ice-cold legal thriller that pedagogically dismantles the death penalty.

Compelling enough while you’re watching it, frustrating then forgettable once it ends, this is a work that wouldn’t command much attention if it came from any other director. Coming from this one, it mostly intrigues as an unexpected if not terribly rewarding change of pace.

The film’s fourth murder involves the slow asphyxiation of the viewer’s patience.