This is a very touching and well-made film, but someone sprinkled it with a little too much fairy dust. I was with it every step of the way, handkerchief in hand for the clockwork gushes that punctuate virtually every dramatic segment with almost pornographic regularity. But this is not a very honest picture of life in Tokyo in 1958, in spite of the insistence that the construction of the city (the bigger picture of society, economy, etc represented by the gradual erecting of Tokyo Tower in the background) is of a piece with the micro-narratives of small individuals going about life on an inconsequential block somewhere in the urban sprawl. Still, whatever project this Disney-esquire nostalgia is serving, I can't discount the film's magic too much. I'm one to prefer a little dark cynicism over what strikes me as a kind of Tinkerbell fraudulence, but I have to admit that this movie is pretty good at what it does.
Review of Always: Sunset on Third Street
