40
Flashbacks integrate with scenes from her films, and it becomes difficult to discern between the two -- cinema is equated with memory. Unfortunately, the trippy disorientation ultimately devolves into outright confusion.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
The New York Times by Dana Stevens
To watch Millennium Actress is to witness one cinematic medium celebrating another, an expression of movie love that is wonderfully eccentric and deeply affecting.
80
Satoshi innovates not by pushing off into more extreme realms of adolescent fantasy, but by using all the resources of animation to tell complex dramatic stories, resources that in his hands seem almost limitless.
50
Contains some brilliant invention between duller stretches.
80
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
Millennium Actress fascinatingly goes where films have not often gone before.
70
TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh
Past and present, reality and fiction blend seamlessly into each other in Satoshi Kon's dream-like animated drama.
75
New York Post by Megan Lehmann
It manages to be both kinetic and dream-like at the same time -- "Run Lola Run" by way of David Lynch.
70
The A.V. Club by Tasha Robinson
Animated in much the same style as "Perfect Blue," but with greater depth and a more elaborate sense of playfulness, Millennium Actress is a visual feast, but also a mental gymnastics routine.
75
The movie's narrative can be taxingly ornate, but there's something beautiful about its metaphorical conflation of politics and glamour, the real and the fictional.
Just as weird and wonderfully convoluted as Kon’s “Paprika,” yet more cohesive and emotionally mature. It makes a beautiful tribute to the legend Setsuko Hara, and a bittersweet commentary on love, memory, and the paths we choose.