Gururi no koto

What a pleasant surprise this was. See zae's comments on this one, nails it. Great acting by the 2 principal leads esp Reiko Kataoka whose character changes radically throughout. The entire cast is excellent also with relevant subplots that help the movie along. You are given an initial seemingly stereotyped story but then "life" steps in with big challenges that are realistic and not overdone. It's a romance but one where the cliches that go with that genre are pretty much absent. Get this.

There are some fine naturalistic scenes in here, but the film is ultimately too long and too thin. The message boils down to "time heals all wounds": bad things happen, but everything turns out all right in the end. Unfortunately, the melodramatic manner in which they do so is too implausible to make us believe it.

Might be one of the most realistic films I've seen. A bit slow at times, but damn, those characters are so three-dimensional they seriously feel like they could be my real-life friends or neighbors, which for me is a first in a movie. So top points to both the writer/director and the actors for that.