Minamata

It's a big story shot in an intimate way, and that doesn’t hurt it at all. The film actually feels almost like a documentary, not about the case, but about the documentation of it, and Johnny Depp is absolutely brilliant. I would like to see him only in roles where he can use a wide range of acting, but at the same time not draw attention to himself. (09/19/2022)

I don't understand how anyone can say Johnny Depp won anything after seeing him doomed to struggle to collaborate with sniveling overplaying Japanese actors in this failed low-budget flick. Indeed, the most enthralling things is watching his discomfort, through which he still tries to escape with bits and tricks into his legendary alcoholic characters. For some reason, the Japanese actors here act a lot like Chinese actors in their contenders. In other words, like simple one-dimensional peasants in righteous anger, but with their hearts in the right place. Poor Depp then shuffles among them in visible discomfort, wondering what to do with himself. As if in revenge for this, the director assigns him scenes where he has to hold a crippled girl in his arms and sing a touching song to her. Beyond that, the film doesn't really know what it wants to be about, whether about Smith or about the circumstances of the Minamata industrial disaster, somehow failing to interweave the two storylines believably, probably because, a) Depp is visibly distanced from the other actors and b) at some point about halfway through the film, the first scene appears in which Smith is abruptly not there at all, suddenly making the film about something quite different. I also struggled with two issues while watching it: the insane writing of the romance between Smith and Aileen reminded me of Vaculik and Třísková's grinding in Nudity for Sale, and as soon as Jun Kunimura appeared on the scene, I got a terrible urge to watch Ichi again. (11/29/2022)