| | Release Date: July 26, 2024 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
35
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Jul 26, 2024
By centering on the start of the film and its conclusion, you realize Wang possesses not only a preternatural feel for the emotional jumble of boyhood, but also an astute understanding of both film structure and how to mine many layers of unforced truth from his troupe of talented actors.
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Jul 26, 2024
It recreates the sensation of drowning in your own hormone-churned emotions so vividly that the film would be difficult to watch if its very existence didn’t serve as a kind of pressure valve. And it provides reassurance that while things may get worse before they get better, this period of life does pass, and eventually you get enough distance to look back on it from the outside as well as from within.
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Jul 25, 2024
Izaac Wang’s performance of this tortured teenage soul — so young, still in braces — is a sensitive expression of the insecurity Chris feels around others and anxiety about how he will be perceived. Wang’s performance is mirrored by Chen as his mother, a housewife with an artist’s heart. She delicately balances steeliness and vulnerability to deliver a heartrending performance.
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Jul 25, 2024
You get the sense watching Didi that this is a bit of an apology from Wang to his own mother for not seeing her as a real person when he was young. But that isn’t all it is: It’s a funny, heartfelt movie, tapping into the audience’s latent memories as well as our great relief at no longer being 13.
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Aug 15, 2024
Dìdi exudes a special kind of empathy and warmth toward the kids who grew up in the age of Myspace, as well as their families. Many coming-of-age stories examine a child’s relationship with themselves and their parents, but Dìdi also tracks how those shifts were made more jarring and strange in the early days of social media.
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The PlaylistJan 29, 2024
Dìdi is the definition of a crowd pleaser. This is a movie that will fill your heart with joy, love, and nostalgia (even if you grew up before Paramore or the early days of Facebook). And for Sean Wang, it’s a film that proves he’s capable of crafting a beautiful, funny, and at times, heartbreaking drama.
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Jan 26, 2024
Sean Wang, as both writer and director, has turned in an excellent entry into the “call your mother” cinematic canon. He doesn’t flinch from the darker or more troublesome aspects of the early teen years, but he ultimately balances them expertly by handling his messy protagonist with generosity and care.
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Jul 24, 2024
Aug 1, 2024
The trick is in the details — in letting the personal bring specificity to the universal while letting the universal illuminate the personal. It’s a balancing act, and writer/director/former teen disaster Sean Wang gets it mostly right in “Dìdi,” his fictionalized memory play of being a floundering Taiwanese American skate kid in 2008 Fremont, Calif.
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RogerEbert.comJul 26, 2024
I could see passing references to “Eighth Grade,” “Skate Kitchen,” "Mid90s,” “Minari,” and “Minding the Gap”—better films that seemed to capture their intended spirit with greater urgency and originality. But upon a recent second watch, I have found that “Didi,” [Wang's] feature directorial debut, is far stronger and far more affecting than I initially gave it credit for.
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Aug 1, 2024
Dìdi, the debut narrative feature from award-winning documentarian Sean Wang, can be seen as a tale of code switching, but that could potentially just pigeonhole it as an immigrant story. It’s broader than that because it’s a more universal study of being a teenage boy, trying to find something like a sense of identity and working out which lies you can and can’t tell yourself.
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Jul 25, 2024
It’s not upsetting, nor is it overly invested in tricking tears out of us. It’s just so specifically observed that you’ll be hiding your head in your hands, ashamed that you were ever as foolish, cowardly, insolent, horny, and ridiculous as Chris (Izaac Wang) A.K.A. Wang Wang to his friends.
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Movie NationFeb 12, 2025
Writer-director Wang isn’t splitting the atom or reinventing the wheel here, and the film’s variations from the tropes for this genre aren’t unique or all that revelatory. But “Didi” makes a most relatable tour guide in helping us remember what running straight into a wall as you hit your teens was like.
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Aug 8, 2024
In Dìdi, development is occurring on multiple axes: technological, social and generational, and the film is best when it’s unmooring these at once. Dìdi is bogged down, though, by its reliance on coming-of-age clichés: sex and drugs as markers of maturity, family conflict that’s easily smoothed over, the struggle of forming an identity when one has an insecure sense of self.
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ColliderFeb 1, 2024
Ultimately, Dìdi's problem is that it is charming but aimless. Izaac Wang is perfectly cast as Chris, and he has amazing chemistry with this cast, but there just isn't enough to go off of. It feels like we're looking into a vignette of someone's life rather than taking in a fully realized story.
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Screen RantAug 22, 2024
There’s no denying this is a film capable of winning audiences of all types with its inherent charm, humor, and nostalgia. For me, however, this was 91 minutes of unfocused, chaotic energy that I did not enjoy. Tonally, the movie is all over the place, while its themes are explored with timid execution.
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