Ozu is obsessed with film's possibility of reporting the poetic truth of the actual. He is reality's artisan, and its connoisseur.

| Jan 22, 2024

In this exquisite merging of specific and universal, infinite and infinitesimal, Tokyo Story perhaps most clearly illuminates that Ozu is not the most Japanese of filmmakers, but the most human.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 24, 2010

Ozu's long shots, knee-high camera placement, and collapsed perspective -- as gorgeous and unsettling as a Cézanne -- gather power over the duration, but time itself is the master's most potent weapon.

| Nov 23, 2010

This remains one of the most approachable and moving of all cinema's masterpieces.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 5, 2010

Ozu may have made subtler films, but the clarity of his social critique here is wrenching and unassailable.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 5, 2010

Ostensibly a snapshot of postwar Japan in the midst of profound cultural change, it is the movie's painful depiction of familial disintegration that remains universal today.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 5, 2010

Ozu only has to train his camera on a face to uncover a sense of resignation, or longing, or loneliness, and the mood, if you allow it, becomes quite overwhelming.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 5, 2010

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 1, 2010

The way Ozu builds up emotional empathy for a sense of disappointment in its various characters is where his mastery lies.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 9, 2006

The already towering reputation of this film and its director continues only to grow.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 9, 2004

It ennobles the cinema. It says, yes, a movie can help us make small steps against our imperfections.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 15, 2004

One of the great classics of world cinema.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 13, 2004

Luminous in its freedom from the sentimentality or the satire that so often obscure an artist's vision of normal living.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 21, 2003