Much has already been made critically of the "novelistic" quality of A One and a Two, a film about the interconnecting tribulations of one extended family in contemporary Taipei. It revolves around a man whose computer firm is failing, whose wife is deeply depressed, whose mother-in-law is gravely ill, whose children are beset with problems, whose dodgy brother-in-law owes him cash. To top it all off, he has just met the person he jilted when she was a schoolgirl 30 years before: now a beautiful and elegant woman who, in a blaze of passion, reveals that her teenage angst and vulnerability are still as fresh as a daisy and demands to know why he left her all those years ago.
-- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

There was a time when a film from Taiwan would have seemed foreign and unfamiliar--when Taiwan had a completely different culture from ours. The characters in "Yi Yi" live in a world that would be much the same in Toronto, London, Bombay, Sydney; in their economic class, in their jobs, culture is established by corporations, real estate, fast food and the media, not by tradition. NJ and Yang-Yang eat at McDonald's, and other characters meet in a Taipei restaurant named New York Bagels. Maybe the movie is not simply about knowing half of the truth, but about knowing the wrong half of the truth.
-- Roger Ebert, ebert.com