Millennium Actress (Sennen joyû) Reviews
Filmcritic.com
Fails in one critical component: We are never made to care about the main character.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
MovieMartyr.com
[It] would deserve credit for being more thematically ambitious than the average animated film if it incorporated those themes with any aplomb.
Full Review
| Original Score: 31/100
Top Critic
A stylish if somewhat disjointed film.
Lessons of Darkness
The finest anime film I've ever seen.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Antagony & Ecstasy
Insofar as the movie recreates Japanese film history, it's as a means of exploring history more generally.
Full Review
| Original Score: 9/10
Common Sense Media
Arty Japanese animated drama is too complex for little ones.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Combustible Celluloid
Kon and co-writer Sadayuki Murai's cleverly slippery story bursts with real passion, overcoming the lack of technical achievement.
Reeling Reviews
This wonderfully unique film is classic anime, but its story is so ingenious, it seems a genre unto itself.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Reeling Reviews
"Millennium Actress" is about unrequited love, devotion, perseverance and hope told in a startlingly simple manner yet with epic proportions.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Spirituality and Practice
Millennium Actress is an enchanting Japanese animated film about a woman whose life is propelled by the yearning in her heart for a mysterious stranger.
Flick Filosopher
Delightfully warm and unexpectedly, deeply humanistic...
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
... Japan has always been more open to the possibilities of the medium to tell sophisticated, mature stories; and this is both, in the best sense of the definition.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
A complex narrative strategy is muddied by emotionally stunted characters in this ambitious and visually sophisticated Japanese anime.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
To watch Millennium Actress' is to witness one cinematic medium celebrating another, an expression of movie love that is wonderfully eccentric and deeply affecting.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
TheMovieChicks.com
The animation may not be as breathtaking as we have seen in other anime movies, but what it lacks in visual style it makes up for with a good story.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
PopMatters
Millennium Actress is smart and complex and beautifully constructed.
eFilmCritic.com
Paints a vivid portrait, blending pathos and unrequited love with a rich collage of Japanese history
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
