Alicia I love this movie so much

Wordiezett So much average

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

ambruce-30535 I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, from the way Chiyoko's story was told to the way they portrayed each period that she lived in.

CinemaClown Taking the viewers through its multitudes of layers, Satoshi Kon's sophomore effort is another mind-bending trip that blurs the lines between reality & cinema this time. Millennium Actress does get difficult to follow at times but the interest in its story is never lost.The story of Millennium Actress follows a TV interviewer & his cameraman who are interviewing a retired actress who vanished from the public eye at the peak of her career. When he presents her with a key she had lost, it unlocks the secrets of her life in unimaginable ways.Co-written & directed by Satoshi Kon (best known for Perfect Blue & Paprika), the film begins on a calm note but things gets more n more intense as plot progresses. Kon's unraveling is slow at first but once the board pieces are set, he starts shifting the gears with added frequency.Unlike his previous feature, Millennium Actress makes terrific use of humour and is often hilarious. The hand-drawn animation is even more impressive, with changing backgrounds that occur without disrupting the characters' actions in the forefront. Also, the shifting perspective never allows the viewers any moment to settle down.On an overall scale, Millennium Actress is an inward journey into one's own past that also serves as Satoshi Kon's ode to both Japanese history & cinema. Not only is its narrative inventive, complex & trippy but it's just as overwhelming, almost to a point that it becomes difficult to keep up with its rapidly changing settings. Still, it is worth a shot for its creativity alone.

tieman64 Satoshi Kon's films tend to have ambitious narrative structures. This one, "Millennium Actress", is no different. It revolves around Genya Tachibana, a documentary director who tracks down Chiyoko Fujiwara, a Japanese movie star he's long admired from afar. He finds her living in the countryside, now a recluse, having retired from acting some 30 years ago.Much of the film watches as Chiyoko recounts her life's story for Tachibana. Her many accomplishments and achievements are then tied to a young man whom she once briefly met and fell in love with. Tachibana, it turns out, spent much of her life attempting to track this man down, not knowing that he died shortly after their first encounter. The film then becomes an elaborate metaphor for a mankind which is doomed to perpetually chase after idealised, objects of desire. The unbridgeable gap between fantasy and reality then becomes the engine which both inspires all human progress, and is responsible for an intrinsic human Lack, an unquenchable discontentment. Achievement, then, is paradoxically tied to an inability to quite achieve. Typifiying the film's psychological complexity, "Millennium Actress" is structured as a grand chase, Chiyoko's reality is repeatedly traumatically interrupted whenever she nears her lover (on a psychological level, humans tend to self-sabotage, or self-destruct the closer they get to Desire), the film is symbolically framed by giant rocket-ships, mankind's capabilities limitless so long as there exists a gap to be bridged, and Tachibana's long-distance love for Chiyoko echoes Chiyoko's own love for the stranger.Whilst the film's first hour may seem disjointed, shapeless and even dull, a powerful ending helps bring things into focus. This ending is almost ruined by an unnecessary line of dialogue, given to Chiyoko, which spells out the film's central theme. It's a heavy-handed and unneeded line. Elsewhere the film uses Chiyoko's life story as a means of trawling through Japan's own political and cinematic history (lots of allusions to famous Japanese films and events).7.9/10 – Worth two viewings.

sandover Two guys, a journalist-fan and a cameraman, go and visit for an interview an old actress-san. But she is not an actress, it's a spirit, and a mess. The spirit of why we go to the movies, epic ones, lovely ones, and with a sustained interest when there is love in the ones...But are we ever satisfied, since we go from one movie to the next, and we never seem to find the perennial text, since she wanders from one film to the next? Oh, certain ones will certainly say, it's the mess of haughty metonymy, that persists on things we've x'd, from one life to the next (to half-quote James Merrill), our desire being ever unsatisfied, and are we defied, does that really interest me? Not this me, unfortunately...As the cameraman stands naggingly, and long before the end redundantly, for the audience, one longs to be something else than an audience, since constantly being reminded so, and to a tepid purpose. The film concludes with a kind of secretive a la "Citizen Cane" phrase, that would clarify things, things concerning the actress's quest: it all is something that goes on forever, supposedly for the sheer pleasure of it, but it all comes off as a kind of masochistic silliness.