What I like most about Central Station is that it has the courage to be realistic instead of sappy and commercial. The heroine is an unattractive, unmarried woman who's gotten used to making a quick buck learning about peoples' lives and deluding herself into thinking she has the power to decide their fates. (She writes letters for people, but sometimes doesn't mail them.) She changes over the course of the movie, but not all at once, and not without making mistakes and falling back a few steps every once in a while. And that's really what this entire story is about, to me; the evolution of this one woman. What I think elevates the movie is that there is this much depth given to one or two other characters as well, so multiple people on multiple viewings can extract multiple meanings from it and be touched by it in different ways.The music was usually very effective, but had a tendency to be incredibly overbearing and misplaced, which spelled melodrama (although thankfully the rest of the movie did not succumb to such misspelling). The cinematography was also quite good, although again had a tendency to be too "Hollywood." Sometimes it seemed as if the film wandered or took a while to find its place, but all in all it was exceptional emotional filmmaking.
IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0140888/