Millennium Actress

A documentary filmmaker tracks down the most famous actress in Japanese cinema history, long retired and living alone. She agrees to be interviewed. The film is that interview - except that the filmmaker and his cameraman keep finding themselves inside her memories, inside her films, chasing her through feudal Japan and wartime Tokyo and science fiction and period drama as the line between the life she lived and the roles she played dissolves completely.

She has been chasing a man since she was a girl. A painter she met once, briefly, who gave her a key and disappeared. Every film she ever made was a version of the pursuit. Every role was a costume worn in service of a search she could not name until the interview forced her to. The film's final revelation arrives quietly and then does not leave.

Satoshi Kon's second film, 2001. Roger Ebert gave it four stars. Kon considered it his most personal work. The emotional mathematics of the final ten minutes are constructed across eighty-seven minutes of setup so careful that the conclusion feels inevitable and impossible simultaneously. The most efficient devastation in the medium. If you watch only one film you have never heard of from this entire collection, let it be this one.