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by Vedant Srinivas

“Record of A Tenement Gentleman” is one of Ozu's great early films, and one which was also screened last year at Cannes as part of their Classics section.

The plot outline of “Record”, like most of Ozu's works, is deceptively simple (and also full of comic touches). In post-war Japan, a man living in an impoverished Tokyo tenement brings home an abandoned child (Kohei). O-Tane, a hard-hearted widow living in the same tenement, is forced to take care of Kohei. In what follows, we gradually see O-Tane's change of heart, from her initial anger at Kohei's bedwetting, her endless tricks to get rid of the boy, to finally growing fond of him.

What is most remarkable is how each scene, character, and setting is ingrained with the disastrous after-effects of WW2. Tashiro, Tamekichi, and O-Tane, the three residents of the tenement we are introduced to, each...

Turner Classic Movies has picked up the exclusive North American television rights to the forthcoming documentary The Ozu Diaries, from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Daniel Raim. An intimate exploration of the life and legacy of Japanese cinematic master Yasujiro Ozu, the film will premiere on the festival circuit this year, followed by a theatrical release in 2025.

Produced with the support of the Ozu estate and Shochiku, the historic Japanese studio behind the director’s greatest works, The Ozu Diaries is a cinema history documentary that portrays the iconic filmmaker through his diaries, personal letters and interviews, plus rare archival footage, movie clips and new insights from some of his closest collaborators.

The project was initiated in 2023 to mark the 120th anniversary of Ozu’s birth. The movie will trace his journey from a rebellious young painter and cinephile in 1920s Japan to the globally renowned creator of classics like I Was Born,...

Ozu Yasujiro, the leading Japanese film director behind classics including “Tokyo Story” and “Late Spring,” has had his double birth and death anniversaries – Ozu died in 1963 on the day of his 60th birthday, a little more than a year after the release of his last film “An Autumn Afternoon” – celebrated throughout 2023 at places as varied as the Cannes Film Festival, Los Angeles’ Margaret Herrick Library and the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute.

But it falls to October’s Tokyo International Film Festival to put on this year’s biggest and most comprehensive reconstruction of Ozu’s surprisingly varied career.

Working in conjunction with the National Film Archive of Japan, the festival will present an extensive retrospective that covers almost all the films that Ozu directed (TIFF/Nfaj Classics: Ozu Yasujiro Week) from Oct. 24-29.

Ozu spent his entire career, from camera assistant in 1923 to renown director in 1962, as an employee of major Japanese studio Shochiku,...

Wayne Wang’s Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, the filmmaker’s follow-up to his existential noir riff Chan Is Missing, again focuses explicitly on the Chinese American community in San Francisco. But where his debut feature found its protagonists constantly scrambling about the city, Dim Sum is set almost exclusively within, or just outside, the domestic space. Echoes of Ozu Yasujirō, specifically Late Spring, ring throughout Wang’s melodrama, whose tender, empathetic, and often funny examination of a loving, codependent mother-daughter relationship is reminiscent of Ryū Chishū and Haru Setsuko’s characters’ in Ozu’s masterwork.

Dim Sum, too, is a film of extended silences and often mundane conversations, and of emotions coursing beneath placid surfaces across settings where old customs collide with new ones. Wang makes evocative use of Ozu’s signature pillow shots throughout, reflecting elements of a Chinese community through shots of Chinatown and its...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSLast Summer.The first round of Cannes-centric announcements has arrived (full selections linked): on Thursday, the festival unveiled the Competition, Un Certain Regard, and Special Screenings lineups. The Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week slates followed on Monday and Tuesday.Applications are now open for this year’s edition of the Locarno Critics Academy. Participating critics will be able to cover the festival and attend workshops with critics, programmers, and filmmakers. Some Notebook samples by a few of last year's critics: Dini Adanurani covered Locarno's experimental 24-hour panel, and Laura Staab contributed interviews with Helena Wittmann and Kelly Reichardt (the latter cowritten with Christopher Small).Jim Jarmusch is planning to shoot his next film in the autumn—characteristically, it will be “quiet, funny,...

While we’ve known the results of Jeanne Dielman Tops Sight and Sound‘s 2022 Greatest Films of All-Time List”>Sight & Sound’s once-in-a-decade greatest films of all-time poll for a few months now, the recent release of the individual ballots has given data-crunching cinephiles a new opportunity to dive deeper. We have Letterboxd lists detailing all 4,400+ films that received at least one vote and another expanding the directors poll, spreadsheets calculating every entry, and now a list ranking how many votes individual directors received for their films.

Tabulated by Genjuro, the list of 35 directors, with two pairs, puts Alfred Hitchcock back on top, while Chantal Akerman is at number two. Elsewhere in the top ten are David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Orson Welles, Yasujirō Ozu, and Stanley Kubrick, and tied for the tenth spot is Wong Kar Wai and Ingmar Bergman.

Check out the list below,...

Click here to read the full article.

Two of the most anticipated Japanese films showing at the Venice Film Festival this year — Kei Ishikawa’s mystery drama A Man (2022) and a digitally remastered version of Yasujirō Ozu’s timeless classic A Hen in the Wind (1948) — share a uniquely curious distinction. The two Japanese films, separated by 74 years, were both written in the exact same room.

Ozu, one of the great masters of cinema history, famously spent long stretches of the 1940s and 1950s — his most productive period — residing and working at Chigasaki-kan, a small ryokan, or traditional Japanese inn, located on a quiet stretch of coast to the southwest of Tokyo. Ozu’s hideaway within the inn was its “niban no oheya,” or “room 2.” A modest space befitting an Ozu drama, the room was designed in Japan’s traditional washitsu style: tatami mats, a simple floor-level table and sliding shoji...

If you are looking for some future truly independent films in the coming years (especially future Sundance selections) just keep an eye out for the scribes, producers and film titles mentioned in the eighteen projects advanced here by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation. Sharing coin totalling 450,000, we have some familiar names in Blindspotting‘s Carlos López Estrada, actress Morningstar Angeline (part of our Sundance Trading Cards series), Matthew Puccini and recent 2022 Sundance Institute Directors and Screenwriters Labs folks in Yuan Yuan (Late Spring) and Hasan Hadi (The President’s Cake). you’ll benefit from the Sffilm Rainin Grant coin.…...

Tan Bee Thiam is a Malaysian producer, director, writer and editor with the 13 Little Pictures, an independent film collective, based in Singapore.

An alumnus of Berlinale Talents, Rotterdam Lab, and European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs (Eave), he produced ”Revenge of the Pontianak” (2019), ”Demons” (2018), ”Snakeskin” (2014), ”03-Flats” (2014), ”As You Were” (2014), ”Eclipses” (2013), ”Red Dragonflies” (2010), ”In the House of Straw” (2009) and ”White Days” (2009). As a director, his works include “Kopi Julia”, one of 13 short films curated by Apichatpong Weerasethakul for the Sharjah Biennale. His co-directorial feature “Fundamentally Happy” was shot by Christopher Doyle and premiered at the Tallinn Black Nights Ff 2015. His first feature film is “Tiong Bahru Social Club”.

On the occasion of his first feature film “Tiong Bahru Social Club” screening at New York Asian Film Festival (Nyaff), we speak with Tan Bee Thiam about two Singaporean architectural giants, parental expectations, the importance of harmony and the yin and yang in life, and...

by Tom Wilmot

Sandwiched between the acclaimed masterpieces “Late Spring” and “Tokyo Story”, “Early Summer” is the middle entry in Yasujiro Ozu’s unofficial Noriko trilogy. Released in 1951, the film marked the second collaboration between the Japanese director and actress Setsuko Hara, who would go on to work with the filmmaker four more times. A cheerful addition to Ozu’s post-war filmography, the film is nevertheless tinged with the melancholy that one would come to expect from the master director.

Noriko Mamiya (Setsuko Hara) lives with her parents, brother, sister-in-law and troublesome nephews in her family’s Tokyo home. We follow each family member as they go about their daily lives, working, parenting, and socialising. Noriko cares for her parents and meets with friends, who mostly squabble amongst themselves over matters regarding marriage. While indifferent to the idea at first, Noriko soon finds herself staring down an arranged engagement,...

Yoshihige Yoshida was 22 years old when he joined Shochiku film studios as an assistant director. At that time, around 1955, Yasujiro Ozu was a nemesis for many young filmmakers at the facility. Ozu resembled commerce and conservatism, a person that does not care for the sociopolitical uproar of the postwar youth and probably the least role model for the yet to be founded “Shochiku New Wave”. Nonetheless, Yoshida, as a part of this new generation of directors, was deeply touched by Ozu’s words and tried to comprehend the meaning of his views on the world and cinema. 30 years after the passing of Yasujiro Ozu, he began to develop a theory about his films. It took five years to finish and is titled “Ozu’s Anti-Cinema”. The book is based on personal encounters with the director leading from Yoshida’s beginnings at Shochiku to the last visit at Ozu’s deathbed.

Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima (1953) is currently available on Blu-ray From Arrow Academy.

Hiroshima (1953) is a powerful evocation of the devastation wrought by the world s first deployment of the atomic bomb and its aftermath, based on the written eye-witness accounts of its child survivors compiled by Dr. Arata Osada for the 1951 book Children Of The A Bomb: Testament Of The Boys And Girls Of Hiroshima.

Adapted for the screen by independent director Hideo Sekigawa and screenwriter Yasutaro Yagi, Hiroshima combines a harrowing documentary realism with moving human drama, in a tale of the suffering, endurance and survival of a group of teachers, their students and their families. It boasts a rousing score composed by Akira Ifukube (Godzilla) and an all-star cast including Yumeji Tsukioka, Isuzu Yamada and Eiji Okada, appearing alongside an estimated 90,000 residents from the city as extras, including many survivors from that fateful day on 6th August 1945.

Hiroshima...

As part of their release slates for the months June and July 2020 Arrow Academy will release the classic Nagisa Oshima “Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence” starring David Bowie and Hideo Sekigawa’s powerful documentary “Hiroshima”

Synopsis for “Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence”

David Bowie stars in Nagisa Oshima’s 1983 Palme d’Or-nominated portrait of resilience, pride, friendship and obsession among four very different men confined in the stifling jungle heat of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Java during World War II.

In 1942, British officer Major Jack Celliers (Bowie) is captured by Japanese soldiers, and after a brutal trial sent, physically debilitated but indomitable in mind, to a Pow camp overseen by the zealous Captain Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto). Celliers’ stubbornness sees him locked in a battle of wills with the camp’s new commandant, a man obsessed with discipline and the glory of Imperial Japan who becomes unnaturally preoccupied with the young Major,...

This audiovisual essay proposes an understanding of cinema as a transformative device able to affect a series of re-signifying operations, involving political and historical re-examination as well as shifts in the subjective experience of time-space. The essay is focused on the transformation that takes place in the viewer’s perception of a specific kind of cinematic entity: filmed void spaces, and how they may turn out to be read as places of memory.Cinema has the possibility of qualifying spaces, materializing information and connotations that, at first sight, seem invisible. This potentiality of cinema unveils the paradoxical complexity of filmed void spaces: something simultaneously is and is no longer there.This is a double transfiguration between each unity of image and sound and what that specific image-sound brick communicates, since they effect each other respectively and at the same time, as a result revealing what is condensed in the shot,...

Can porn be art? This question seems to be contradicting itself. Art calls for our contemplation, while porn requires our bodily involvement. How can a film excite its viewers on these two fronts? Masayuki Suo’s pink film (“pinku eiga”; it refers Japanese softcore pornographic films produced since the sixties) “Abnormal Family” seems to be a rare beast that combines stylistic commitments with titillating imageries. Once studying film with Japan’s leading intellectual Shigehiko Hasumi, Suo’s film is a love (erotic?) letter to Ozu’s films.

Unmarried daughters. Bickering relatives. Taciturn fathers. A teapot. A vase. A Noh performance. A Coca-Cola signpost. A corner of the Kita-Kamakura station. These are the basic elements of the Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu’s cinematic world. In these quiet corners of Japan, there will always be a father who is worried about marrying off his daughters. The tradition must go on,...

#14. Il Buco / The Hole

It’s been a full decade without a new narrative feature from Italy’s Michelangelo Frammartino, whose Le Quattro Volte was one of 2010’s most notable films. After spending years developing a project called Late Spring, which was said to be a Pinocchio-like fantasy told in reverse, this past September Frammartino finally commenced a new project, Il Buco (The Hole), a period piece on some noted spelunkers, lensed by famed Dp Renato Berta.…...

Can porn be art? This question seems to be contradicting itself. Art calls for our contemplation, while porn requires our bodily involvement. How can a film excite its viewers on these two fronts? Masayuki Suo’s pink film (“pinku eiga”; it refers Japanese softcore pornographic films produced since the sixties) “Abnormal Family” seems to be a rare beast that combines stylistic commitments with titillating imageries. Once studying film with Japan’s leading intellectual Shigehiko Hasumi, Suo’s film is a love (erotic?) letter to Ozu’s films.

Abnormal Family is screening at Japan Cuts 2018

Unmarried daughters. Bickering relatives. Taciturn fathers. A teapot. A vase. A Noh performance. A Coca-Cola signpost. A corner of the Kita-Kamakura station. These are the basic elements of the Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu’s cinematic world. In these quiet corners of Japan, there will always be a father who is worried about marrying off his daughters.

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (Alexandra Dean)

The tell-all “autobiography” Ecstasy and Me: My Life As A Woman was exactly what Hedy Lamarr’s agent wanted to make quick money. But it wasn’t her life. Whether her ghostwriter’s words were true or not, the story dealt with everything she hoped wouldn’t define her legacy. Sadly she never had the chance to set the record straight with...

Below is a strictly personal, unapologetically idiosyncratic list of the twenty films I'm most looking forward to in 2018 and which have so far yet to be seen by any paying audiences. Among those seriously considered but ultimately excluded on the basis that they're more likely to be ready next year are Ad Astra (James Gray), Blessed Virgin (Paul Verhoeven), The Fire Next Time (Mati Diop), Late Spring (Michelangelo Frammartino), the particularly-dynamite-on-paper Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello), Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due (Abdellatif Kechiche) and Motorboats (Yuri Ancarani). I also reluctantly discarded a couple of highly tantalising projects whose status, at the time of writing, was frustratingly unclear, namely Tijuana Bible (Jean-Charles Hue) and the worryingly long-in-gestation You Can't Win (Robinson Devor). Omitted because they're made primarily for TV rather than cinemas: Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (Netflix) and Bruno Dumont's Coincoin and the Extra-Humans (Arté). Finally, Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir: Part I...

Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.)

This week’s question: What filmmaker would you most like to see try their hand at a horror movie?

Kristy Puchko (@KristyPuchko), Pajiba/Riot Material

I struggled with this question, because a lot of the directors I have adored have worked in horror, be it Tim Burton (“Beetlejuice,” “Edward Scissorhands”), Robert Zemeckis (“Death Becomes Her”), Edgar Wright (“Shawn of the Dead”), Frank Oz (“Little Shop of Horror”), Guillermo del Toro (“Crimson Peak”), Bong-Joon Ho (“The Host”), Jim Jarmusch (“Only Lovers Left Alive”), or Taika Waititi (“What We Do In the Shadows”). Part of what I love about the genre is the way is can be reshaped with vision, color,...

Dear Kelley and Fern,As you both noted earlier, John Woo’s Manhunt was a thrilling, tongue-in-cheek compendium of the director's best qualities. This kind of masterful self-reflexivity may rub some the wrong way—remember, at the time, the hostility to De Palma’s Femme Fatale and Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. as if they were only Directors' Greatest Hits?—but when done smartly this is no mere masturbation, but a celebration and self-questioning, honed to deft precision, of an artist’s perennial themes.Such is the case with one of the few great feature films I've seen here in Toronto, Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. In remarkable contrast to his last film, the coked-up cartoon Dog Eat Dog, it is is a self-consciously austere drama of a wearied priest (a tremendous, hollowed-out Ethan Hawke) of a minuscule congregation housed in the oldest church in America, one dismissively dubbed the ‘souvenirs shop’ by the newer,...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash)

That there’s a fair chance you’ve never seen Daughters of the Dust — full disclosure: I am among these people — should be taken as a failure of distribution and exposure, not the film’s quality and impact. There’s also a fair chance that the closest you’ve really come to Julie Dash‘s 1991 film is Beyoncé’s Lemonade, which paid a direct visual tribute that,...

The Video Essay is a joint project of Mubi and Filmadrid Festival Internacional de Cine. Film analysis and criticism found a completely new and innovative path with the arrival of the video essay, a relatively recent form that already has its own masters and is becoming increasingly popular. The limits of this discipline are constantly expanding; new essayists are finding innovative ways to study the history of cinema working with images. With this non-competitive section of the festival both Mubi and Filmadrid will offer the platform and visibility the video essay deserves. The seven selected works will be shown during the dates of Filmadrid (June 8 - 17, 2017) on Mubi’s cinema publication, the Notebook. Also there will be a free public screening of the selected works during the festival. The selection was made by the programmers of Mubi and Filmadrid.永遠の処女 · The Eternal VirginVideo essay by Jorge Suárez-Quiñones RivasThe understanding of domestic,...

The long anticipated, seemingly inevitable but frustratingly overdue upgrade of Yasujiro Ozu’s second color film Good Morning finally became a reality earlier this week. A pristine new edition of Spine #84 has just landed on the shelves, and it’s a cause for joyful celebration for Ozu aficionados and newcomers alike, who now have the opportunity to rediscover one of the great director’s most enchanting films. It’s hard to overstate just how much a new transfer and a tidy array of supplemental features allow Good Morning‘s virtues to shine, but I can attest without reservation that this release feels every bit as essential and fully realized as any of the other three Ozu Blu-rays that Criterion has previously made available.

Yes, Tokyo Story, Late Spring and Autumn Afternoon, the director’s final film, are all widely esteemed as monumental works, whereas Good Morning is often relegated to “lesser Ozu” status.

Mark, Aaron and Matt Gasteier explore the filmmaking world of Yasujirō Ozu, centering on his pivotal masterpiece Late Spring (1949). It would be impossible to explore all of his dozens of his films in one episode, so we give an overview of his work, his style, and his contributions towards international cinema.

3:00 – Ozu Introduction

15:00 – Ozu biography & style

29:00 – Setsuko Hara

39:00 – Late Spring

Criterion Current – Ozu and Setsuko Hara David Bordwell – Ozu Book Criterion Collected Episode Credits Mark Hurne: Twitter | Letterboxd Aaron West: Twitter | Blog | Letterboxd Matt Gasteier: Twitter | Letterboxd Criterion Close-Up: Facebook | Twitter | Email

Next time on the podcast: French Series, Part Three...

Mark and Aaron get back to this century with a look at Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. Naturally we talk about Adam Sandler’s dramatic acting jobs, and well, what happened to them? We go further into PTA’s career, film by film, chronicling the evolution of his craft and style. We explore why he is so popular, and question whether he belongs in the conversation of greatest living filmmakers.

3:40 – Punch Drunk Love

47:40 – Paul Thomas Anderson

Criterion – Punch-Drunk Love Criterion – Paul Thomas Anderson’s Favorite Films The Film Faculty – PTA Retrospective Mark’s Amazon Wish List. Happy Birthday, Mark! Episode Credits Mark Hurne: Twitter | Letterboxd Aaron West: Twitter | Blog | Letterboxd Criterion Close-Up: Facebook | Twitter | Email

Next time on the podcast: Late Spring...

News Flash! (Dateline: Chicago Il. January 10, 2017.) The Criterion Collection launches its 2017 campaign today with a raucous one-two punch that summons fond memories of Hollywood’s Golden Age while jabbing its finger into the chest of today’s corrupt media hacks. His Girl Friday, that epitome of classic screwball comedy, gets the deluxe treatment in a handsome dual-disc Blu-ray edition that also serves as a fancy showcase for its influential predecessor The Front Page. This winning effort by the whipsmart Criterion team spares no expense, as both flicks leap off the screen with a frenetic urgency that almost seems improper for relics of such venerable age.

But it’s not the longevity that sells this package, it’s the the relevance of how concisely the parallel stories, each with their own sharp accents of distinction, speak to today – how the brilliant cynicism of Ben Hecht’s snappy dialog simultaneously captures the...

Late Spring

Director: Michelangelo Frammartino

Writer: Michelangelo Frammartino

Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino announced himself as an important new cinematic talent with his 2010 sophomore film Le Quattro Volte.

Continue reading...

There’s been an epic find for serious film buffs this week. A nearly-finished 1929 film called “Tokkan Kozo,” or “A Straightforward Boy,” by the hugely-influential Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu has been uncovered. A representative of the Toy Film Museum in Kyoto and professor at the Osaka University of Arts, Yoneo Ota, announced the news at a September 6th conference.

Read More: 5 Essential Films By Yasujirō Ozu

“A Straightforward Boy” was gifted along with a collection of other films to the Toy Film Museum from the estate of a film fan. The found comedy is a shorter version of the 38 minute original movie, which remains lost, like many Japanese films shot before WWII. The museum is working to restore the film before it is screened later at the Kyoto International Film and Art Festival.

“A Straightforward Boy” depicts an abducted young boy who turns out too troublesome for his captor. The...

Today I’m delighted to welcome Julie Czerneda as part of the Futures Past Tour celebrating the release of her upcoming science fiction novel! The Gate to Futures Past, the second book in the Reunification trilogy after This Gulf of Time and Stars, will be released on September 6, and I have a guest post by the author and a book giveaway of both Reunification books—plus Daw Books is offering a tour-wide giveaway of all eight Clan Chronicles books!

Cover Credit: Matt Stawicki

Move in the Midst? Oh, why not?!

Let me count the ways, shall I? First, to set the scene.

We’d lived in the same spot for a staggering (for us) 24 years. Time to go, we decided. Late spring, 2015, we put our house on the market for a month—a trial run, so to speak—then took it off again. No takers and, after all, I’d a book to finish.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then there will never be a definitive list of the greatest cinematography, but for our money, one of the finest polls has been recently conducted on the matter. Our friend Scout Tafoya polled over 60 critics on Fandor, including some of us here, and the results can be found in a fantastic video essay below. Rather than the various wordless supercuts that crowd Vimeo, Tafoya wrestles with his thoughts on cinematography as we see the beautiful images overlaid from the top 12 choices.

“I’ve been thinking of the world cinematographically since high school,” Scout says. “Sometime around tenth grade I started looking out windows, at crowds of my peers, at the girls I had crushes on, and imagining the best way to film them. Lowlight, mini-dv or 35mm? Curious and washed out like the way Emmanuel Lubezki shot Y Tu Mamá También,...

The Asian Cinema 100 list was released last year at the Biff (Busan International Film Festival), which marked its 20th anniversary with a poll of prominent Asian filmmakers and international critics of Asian film, who were all asked for their top ten of all time.

Japan accounted for 26 films on the list, followed by Iran (19) and Korea (15).

The oldest film chosen was Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born, But (1932), ranked 48th of all time. And the top animated film to make the cut was Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001), joint 18th.

The top 5 Japanese films are listed below in rank order.

1. Tokyo Story (1953), #1

Routinely hailed as one of the greatest films ever made. Tokyo Story is Yasujiro Ozu‘s restrained masterpiece of an ordinary family life, chronicling human behavior in ordinary situations.

It opens with the putt-putt sound of a boat and the wisps of smoke rising from the chimneys of...

If, within art cinema, there comes the instant gravitation to less the film than the name — the all-powerful auteur that supposedly doesn’t have to bow down to corporate masters — then even with a film as immediately striking as 1976’s Insiang, we begin with its author, Lino Brocka. Even in a life cut tragically short, he left enough of a mark to still be considered the Philippines’ greatest filmmaker, amongst his laurels being the nation’s first director to play in competition at Cannes. A particular association made with him was an outspoken criticism of the Philippines’ dictator-in-chief, Ferdinand Marcos.

But carrying that expectation over to Insiang, even without one mention of Marcos’ name throughout the film, the presence of both a fundamentally rotten authority and people left to fend for themselves in poverty leans a viewer, even the uninformed, towards assuming a greater institutional critique. Yet to quickly sum...

Get yer terrific long-suppressed film history right here, folks -- this is what it takes to get your movie banned in East Germany in 1965: Günter Stahnke makes a drama revealing forbidden capitalist-style competitiveness and dastardly backstabbing in a state-run industry. Think any of those Party censors would object? Spring Takes Time DVD Defa Film Library 1965 / B&W / 1:37 flat / 76 min. / Der Frühling braucht Zeit / Street Date March 2016 / available through The Defa Film Library / 29.95 Starring Eberhard Mellies, Günther Simon, Doris Abesser, Karla Runkehl, Rolf Hoppe, Erik S. Klein, Friedrich Richter, Elfriede Née. Cinematography Lothar Erdmann, Eckhardt Hartkopf, Hans-Jürgen Sasse, Kurt Schütt Film Editor Erika Lehmphul Original Music Gerhard Siebholz; 'The Sputniks' Written by Hermann O. Lauterbach, Konrad Schwalbe, Günter Stahnke Produced by Defa Directed by Günter Stahnke

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

So you think artists over Here have it bad... Günter Stahnke experienced some late-career fame at the 1990 Berlinale film festival,...

If you go down to NYC’s Film Forum this week, you’ll find a cinephile treat: a new 4K restoration of “Late Spring,” one of the finest films from Yasujirō Ozu, one of the finest filmmakers that ever lived. Obviously, many of you are geographically unable to do that, but to us, it served as a reminder that we’ve never written a feature specifically built around Ozu’s work, and that seemed like an omission that needed rectifying immediately. Read More: Watch: 17-Minute Video Essay Explores The Depth Of Simplicity In The Films Of Yasujirō Ozu For the uninitiated, Ozu had a thirty-five year career, staring with his silent short debut in 1927, to his death in 1963, and he scarcely made a bad film. He was always acclaimed at home, but only found an international following after his passing thanks to fans and critics like Paul Schrader and David Bordwell.

Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Metrograph

The most exciting theater to hit New York in years opens today. They’ll begin with The Purple Rose of Cairo and Taxi Driver on Friday. Saturday and Sunday unbelievably packed, the schedule including The Spirit of the Beehive, Vivre Sa Vie, The Long Day Closes, Femme Fatale, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, and Noah Baumbach‘s...

With the 2015 awards season finally wrapped up, we can now genuinely look towards the year ahead. This month brings a handful of long-awaited festival hold-overs from last year, as well as a few promising studio titles. It should also be noted that essential restorations of Late Spring (3/4), River of Grass (3/11), A Brighter Summer Day (3/11), and Fireworks Wednesday (3/16) will be coming to select cities (and some beyond). If you’re in New York City, we’ll also be getting the grand opening of a new arthouse cinema — the Lower East Side’s Metrograph, which is dedicated to a mix of repertory and new releases.

Matinees to See: Songs My Brothers Taught Me (3/2), The Wave (3/4), Boy and the Beast (3/4), Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (3/4), Creative Control (3/11), Eye in the Sky (3/11), Hello, My Name is Doris (3/11), Lolo (3/11), Marguerite (3/11), Remember (3/11), Hyena Road (3/11), The Little Prince (3/18), Too Late (3/18), The Program (3/18), and Born to be Blue (3/25).

10. Take Me to the River...

Late Spring

Director: Michelangelo Frammartino

Writer: Michelangelo Frammartino

Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino announced himself as an important new cinematic talent with his 2010 sophomore film Le Quattro Volte. He’s been developing his latest feature Tarda primavera (Late Spring) with producer Marta Donzelli, who had claimed the feature was supposed to film over the summer in 2015. Described as a fantasy film version of Pinocchio but told in reverse order, no confirmations of completion have yet to surface, so there’s a possibility this could be delayed until 2017 depending on Frammartino’s post-production period. The title is meant to close the animist trilogy that began with his 2003 film The Gift.

Cast: Na

Producers: Marta Donzelli

U.S. Distributor: Rights available Tbd (domestic/international)

Release Date: Le Quattro Volte was unveiled in Directors’ Fortnight. If Frammartino is indeed ready for 2016, we expect a slot in Ucr, if not a fighting chance at the...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.When Directors CollideLeft: Emigre directors Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang take a dip in the pool. Right: John Ford visits Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor set.Philippe Garrel Remembers Chantal AkermanThe essential read of the week is Craig Keller's translation of French filmmaker Philippe Garrel's reflections on Chantal Akerman, published in Cahiers du Cinéma in November:"We only ran into one another with finished films, not in the factory. It was always one film under our arms, one new film under our arms. We weren't at all jealous of one another; just the opposite. I was laughing, saying if Chantal hadn't liked women, I would have married her. I thought she was an extraordinary woman."Trailer for King Hu's A Touch of ZenA new trailer for the...

Few filmmakers have the reputation of the late, great Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu. The director, who began making silent films in the 1920s, went on to develop one of the most full-bodied and idiosyncratic styles in cinematic history. Watching an Ozu film is unlike anything else (save for all those films that attempt to mimic his many should-be-patented moves). Near the end of his career, Ozu was on a roll, pumping out three of Japan’s greatest films between 1949 and 1953: “Late Spring,” “Early Summer,” and “Tokyo Story” (which frequently haunts many greatest-ever lists). Read More: 10-Minute Video Essay Explores the Parallels Between Yasujirō Ozu and Wes Anderson Almost right on time to mark the anniversary of his birth (and death), the folks over at Channel Criswell have put together “Yasujirō Ozu — The Depth Of Simplicity.” The 17-minute video essay takes a long, guided tour through the many stylistic tics...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.Setsuko Hara, 1920 - 2015The great Japanese actress of Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring and Mikio Naruse's Repast passed away in September but the news has only recently been released. An indelible screen presence whose absence from movies has been felt every year since 1966.My MotherTop 10s: Cahiers du Cinéma + Sight & SoundFor us it's still too early to make judgement—we've hardly caught up with all of 2015's great cinema!—but the esteemed magazines of Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound have made their selections for the best of the year:Cahiers du Cinéma1. My Mother (Nanni Moretti)2. Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)3. In the Shadow of Women (Philippe Garrel)4. The Smell of Us (Larry Clark)5. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)6. Jauja (Lisandor Alonso)7. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)8. Arabian Nights...

Setsuko Hara, a Japanese actress best known for her work in the films of Yasujiro Ozu, died of pneumonia on September 5, her family revealed to the press today. She was 95. Perhaps best known for playing a widow who befriends the parents of her late husband in Tokyo Story, Ozu's 1953 masterwork, Hara also appeared in several other iconic postwar films before retiring from public life at the age of 42.Born Masae Aida in Yokohama in 1920, Hara made her screen debut at 15 in Don't Hesitate, Young Folks (1935), and later starred in the German-Japanese propaganda film The Daughter of the Samurai in 1937. After World War II, Hara worked with Akira Kurosawa, in No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) and Hakuchi (1951) (the director's adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot), and Kozaburo Yoshimura, in A Ball at the Anjo House (1947). In 1949, she appeared in her first Ozu film, Late Spring, which marked the beginning of an artistic...

Korean sales agent Finecut has secured a raft of deals on Hong Sangsoo’s Locarno Golden Leopard winner Right Now, Wrong Then and picked up mystery thriller Fatal Intuition at Busan’s Asian Film Market.

Currently screening in the Korean Cinema Today - Panorama section at Busan, Right Now, Wrong Then sold to France (Les Acacias), Brazil (Zeta Films), Spain (La Aventura Audiovisual), Portugal (Leopardo Films), Austria (Stadtkino-Filmverleih) and Sweden (Folkets Bio).

Finecut’s new pick-up Fatal Intuition stars Joo Won (from Fashion King and TV series Good Doctor) as a brother who goes after his only sister’s killer with the help of a woman who can foresee other people’s deaths played by Lee You-young (best actress winner at Milano for her performance in Late Spring).

Established character actor Yoo Hai-jin (from hits such as Veteran, The Pirates and The Unjust) plays the prime suspect.

Director Yun Jun-hyoung’s second feature, Fatal Intuition...

Robert Pattinson: Actor to play E.T. astronaut. Robert Pattinson to star for Claire Denis If all goes as planned, Robert Pattinson will get to star in French screenwriter-director Claire Denis' recently announced – and as yet untitled – English-language sci-fier, penned by Denis and White Teeth author Zadie Smith and her novelist husband Nick Laird, from an original idea by Denis and writing partner Jean-Pol Fargeau. Among Claire Denis' credits are the interracial love story Chocolat (1988), the sociopolitical drama White Material (2009), and the generally well-regarded Billy Budd reboot Beau Travail (1999), winner of the César Award for Best Cinematography (Agnès Godard). Robert Pattinson, for his part, is best known for playing the veggie vampire in the wildly popular Twilight movies costarring Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner. Robert Pattinson, astronaut In Claire Denis' film, Robert Pattinson is slated to play an E.T. astronaut. But what happens to said astronaut? Does...

Christian Petzold took a bold step into history with 2012's Barbara, exiling Nina Hoss's heroine into the diaphanous threats and suspicions of a provincial, 1980s East Germany. With Phoenix, his follow-up, Petzold takes this movement into history even further, striking starkly, deeply at questions of identity in a post-war Germany quivering silently with destitution, rage, and willful blindness. In a spectral sequence opening the film directly evoking the eerie clinical imagery of Georges Franju's lyrical horror film Eyes without a Face, Nelly, a concentration camp survivor, returns in quiet to Berlin after having reconstructive surgery following wartime mutilations. The woman who emerges from under the knife cannot be recognized. She emerges as embodied by Nina Hoss—a true queen in today's cinema—and her slender, lean physique becomes that of a post-war zombie, a ghost embodied, tottering and halting, a body not familiar with movements outside the camp,...

The Criterion Collection refurbishes its previous release of Yasujiro Ozu’s 1962 swan song, An Autumn Afternoon for a new digital restoration Blu-ray transfer. The auteur, often described as the ‘most Japanese’ of directors, is a prominent cinematic figure (which explains his heavy presence in Criterion’s vault), ranking alongside the likes of Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi. Yet Ozu was a much more subtle, even methodical filmmaker in comparison, reveling in the depiction of everyday life acted out amongst traditional (some would say banal) activities, meant to reflect the changing cultural landscapes that often place its inhabitants at uncomfortable odds.

An aging widower, Shuhei Hiroyama (Chishu Ryu) lives with daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita) and a younger son. Michiko tends to her father and brother, and it seems a happy existence for all, but now at the age of twenty-four, outsiders are beginning to question why her father hasn’t arranged for her to be married.

Setsuko Hara is one of the most recognizable Japanese actresses of all time. She's more commonly known to Western audiences as Yasujirô Ozu's muse; a muse so loyal that she allegedly quit acting after he passed away in 1963, becoming recluse even up to today (yes she's still alive). Which is unfortunate because three decades of her onscreen is not enough. Her more famous films, Tokyo Story and Late Spring, barely scratch the surface of her talent. But for now, with nine of her films streaming here, you have to time get acquainted, or reacquainted with her body work. Here are three reasons, as if you need them, to watch Setsuko Hara at her finest.>> - Alece Oxendine...

Setsuko Hara is one of the most recognizable Japanese actresses of all time. She's more commonly known to Western audiences as Yasujirô Ozu's muse; a muse so loyal that she allegedly quit acting after he passed away in 1963, becoming recluse even up to today (yes she's still alive). Which is unfortunate because three decades of her onscreen is not enough. Her more famous films, Tokyo Story and Late Spring, barely scratch the surface of her talent. But for now, with nine of her films streaming here, you have to time get acquainted, or reacquainted with her body work. Here are three reasons, as if you need them, to watch Setsuko Hara at her finest.>> - Alece Oxendine...

The Criterion Collection has morality and crime on the mind for their April releases. It's a month that may be short on show-stopping titles, but for anyone looking to dig deeper into the some of the most legendary filmmakers the form has ever seen, this will be a good time to drop some dollars. We'll start over on the Eclipse line, where Yasujiro Ozu has three of his crime flicks collected: "Walk Cheerfully," "That Night's Wife," and "Dragnet Girl." In addition to being a different flavor from his more well known works like "Tokyo Story" and "Late Spring," they are also silent, giving these dramas a different edge. One to seek out if you're feeling adventurous. Meanwhile, Jean-Pierre Melville, the master behind "Le Samourai," "Le Cercle Rouge," and "Bob Le Flambeur," will see his "Le Silence De La Mer" enter the Collection. It will come packaged with interviews and an essay,...

Mike Huckabee is leaving Fox News to consider a re-entry into politics.

He made the announcement just before Saturday’s episode of “Huckabee,” the final hour of the political commentary program. The former Republican presidential candidate is leaving to consider another run at the office in 2016, after President Barack Obama vacates, though Huckabee plans to save that decision for a later date.

See Photos: 24 TV Newscasters Ranked by Popularity

“Tonight I will do more than just say goodnight. I will say goodbye. This is the last edition of ‘Huckabee’ on the Fox News Channel,” he wrote Saturday on his website,...