Belle Review: Stylish but Unconvincing

I’ll admit it right away, I’m not the biggest fan of Mamoru Hosoda’s work. They’re really well-made movies with beautiful art and animation but I just don’t connect with them for one reason or another.

I almost feel bad because I usually don’t have any good reasons for that either.

Sure, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Your Name, but I can pinpoint a few things that I felt didn’t work well. With Hosoda’s movies, they’re generally pretty alright, but I just dislike them for reasons I can’t justify properly.

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Hold Me Like A Mother Would – The Before Trilogy Then & Now

It has been 26 years since Before Sunrise was first released. I remember watching the movie for the first time around the early 2000s and it has been my favorite romance movie since then. The last time I had watched all three movies in the trilogy was back in 2014. The lock-down seemed like a great time to go back and revisit the trilogy and I have found that with time, my feelings and opinions about the movies have radically changed.

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Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town – An Almost Good Movie

Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town is an indie movie released in 2018. I just watched it a few weeks ago and to be honest, I wasn’t that impressed with it and something about it kept bothering me. The movie hasn’t completely left my mind for weeks and I guess this review is my attempt to find out the reason.

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Millennium Actress and the Importance of Art

Directed by Satoshi Kon, Millennium Actress (Sennen Joyū) was released in 2001 to a generally positive reception. Much lighter in tone compared to the director’s previous film, Perfect Blue, this film is a masterful love letter to Japanese cinema and one of its most iconic figures, Setsuko Hara. There’s a lot you can take from Millennium Actress and much has already been said about it. In fact, I seriously doubt I can fit everything I want to say about the film in this post alone but I still want to highlight what made it memorable for me. There will be spoilers, of course. If you haven’t watched the film yet, please go ahead and do so. It has my highest recommendation, whatever that might be worth to you.

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