Millennium Actress

Few films treat the line between a life and a performance as thoughtfully as this one. Memory, acting and film history run together, and the story moves freely through time, so that a documentary interview and the movies in an actress's career start to feel like the same thing.

It is a drama with romance and fantasy folded in, aimed squarely at adults, with a female lead whose long career gives the story its sweep. The tone is reflective and a little wistful, and the meta angle rewards people who enjoy movies and how they get made. It asks for your attention, because truth and fiction keep blurring, but it repays that with a story that is easy to feel even when it is hard to pin down.

A single feature from MADHOUSE, it fits in one sitting. More than sixty thousand people have it on a list and rate it well, so it is far from unknown, but it is still an easy one to overlook next to louder titles. You can find it on Amazon Prime Video, Tubi TV, Crunchyroll and YouTube, which gives you plenty of ways in.