Akitsu onsen

Yoshishige Yoshida's most celebrated movies tend to be his super dense and hard-to-approach ones, with Akitsu Hot Springs - for at least some of its runtime - making the case that Yoshida was genuinely just as well-suited to making more conventional films.

This starts off strong, and I'd say at least the first hour or so is very good, taking place after the Second World War and revolving around a dramatic romance/affair between two people, and the consequences that come about from it.

But it lost me a little during its second hour, kind of drifting around and repeating itself a bit too much... and not really in the sort of artistic way Yoshida did in full art-house mode; it just feels a bit like the people behind this got lost at a point, and sort of just shuffled along toward an ending of some sort.

It's half a good movie followed by half a pretty meandering movie. Perhaps a little disappointing as a whole, but I was on board with it for a while at least before I kind of felt worn out by the whole thing.