Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Narratage was a slow moving movie with some gut-wrenching parts but overall suffers from pacing and sometimes confusing time jumps. The ending is frustrating to anyone who wanted a real conclusion and I found myself wondering why I went to this movie at all because of that. MatsuJun plays a wishy washy teacher who has issues that aren't completely addressed and in fact you want to want to punch him for his inaction and passiveness. But then again the main character, Izumi, is just as wishy washy as her Sensei. Overall, it's an interesting premise, a somewhat ambiguous conclusion but the characters themselves were lacking in some fundamental way that would make me sympathize with any of them. Instead I found myself sighing at their antics. Or maybe I'm just desensitized to love stories like this. I believe they were going for a slice of life, painful first love sort of thing, but I just rolled my eyes most of the time. But I guess if that's your thing, don't let me stop you from watching this. It has all the cliché love parts that would probably have a more romantically inclined person's heart beating but did nothing to melt the ice cold that mine is made of.As a side note for those just watching for MatsuJun, he isn't in this as much as I was lead to believe, from the trailers and instead this is being lead mostly by Kasumi and Kentaro.