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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...

One of the trademarks of Yasuhiro Ozu’s family dramas is the remarkably realistic presentation of everyday life in Japan. “The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice” also entails this characteristic, but also moments of comedy that deem the movie quite approachable.

The film revolves around a childless, middle-aged couple in post-war Japan, Taeko and Mokichi. Taeko is deeply unsatisfied with her wedding, and channels her frustration through behaviour that could be perceived extreme at the time, cheating her husband to go on a trip with friends, or going on trips without notifying anyone. Furthermore, she mocks her husband to her girlfriends every chance she gets. Mokichi on the other hand, seems almost oblivious to his wife’s mentality, as he eventually starts frequenting a pachinko parlor run by a former army comrade, along with a young friend, Non. In the middle of this situation is their niece,...

For those accustomed to the bittersweet greatest hits of Japanese auteur Yasujirô Ozu’s later period familial dramas, the lesser known 1952 social satire The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice reminds one of a wider range than some of his revered titles would indicate. Seeing as this more obscured title arrived just a year prior to 1953’s ineffably devastating Tokyo Story (review), with its poignant intergenerational rifts, makes the latter title all the more unprecedented. Likewise, the coterie of titles marked by seasonal or time-oriented motifs which would follow in quick succession (Early Spring; Tokyo Twilight; Equinox Flower; Good Morning; Late Autumn; The End of Summer; An Autumn Afternoon) speaks to Ozu’s own dislike for the themes and motifs used here.…...

Any list of the greatest foreign directors currently working today has to include Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The directors first rose to prominence in the mid 1990s with efforts like “The Promise” and “Rosetta,” and they’ve continued to excel in the 21st century with titles such as “The Kid With A Bike” and “Two Days One Night,” which earned Marion Cotillard a Best Actress Oscar nomination.

Read MoreThe Dardenne Brothers’ Next Film Will Be a Terrorism Drama

The directors will be back in U.S. theaters with the release of “The Unknown Girl” on September 8, which is a long time coming considering the film first premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016. While you continue to wait for their new movie, the brothers have provided their definitive list of 79 movies from the 20th century that you must see. La Cinetek published the list in full and is hosting many...

ZamaThe programme for the 2017 edition of the Venice Film Festival has been unveiled, and includes new films from Darren Aronofsky, Lucrecia Martel, Frederick Wiseman, Alexander Payne, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Abdellatif Kechiche, Takeshi Kitano and many more.COMPETITIONmother! (Darren Aronofsky)First Reformed (Paul Schrader)Sweet Country (Warwick Thornton)The Leisure Seeker (Paolo Virzi)Una Famiglia (Sebastiano Riso)Ex Libris - The New York Public Library (Frederick Wiseman)Angels Wear White (Vivian Qu)The Whale (Andrea Pallaoro)Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh)Foxtrot (Samuel Maoz)Ammore e malavita (Manetti Brothers)Jusqu'a la garde (Xavier Legrand)The Third Murder (Hirokazu Kore-eda)Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno (Abdellatif Kechiche)Lean on Pete (Andrew Haigh)L'insulte (Ziad Doueiri)La Villa (Robert Guediguian)The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro)Suburbicon (George Clooney)Human Flow (Ai Weiwei)Downsizing (Alexander Payne)Out Of COMPETITIONFeaturesOur Souls at Night (Ritesh Batra)Il Signor Rotpeter (Antonietta de Lillo)Victoria...

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.

Chicago – Director Jack C. Newell ended up meeting one of his great collaborators while taking classes at Columbia College Chicago. His future filmmaking partner turned out to not be a fellow peer, but his teacher, Ron Falzone. Together, they made the acclaimed short, “Typing,” about two Hollywood screenwriters whose brainstorming session draws inspiration from the clacking of typewriter keys in the next room.

Newell and Falzone’s first feature effort is “Close Quarters,” an endearing and insightful collection of parallel vignettes set in a Chicago coffee shop. Baristas Abby (Erica Unger) and Barry (Seth Unger) flirt with the possibility of long-term romance while observing the dysfunctional relationships of their customers. Two friends, Patrick (Tj Jagodowski) and Olivia (Kate Duffy), chat upstairs while their respective partners, Dina (Holly Laurent) and Cary (Dave Pasquesi), make love in the downstairs bathroom. An estranged couple (Susan Messing and Jim Carlson) argue over Skype while...

Chikage Awashima and Kazuo Hasegawa in Zangiku Monogatari (1956)

"Chikage Awashima, an actress known internationally for her work with Yasujiro Ozu and other greats of Japanese cinema's 1950s golden age, died of pancreatic cancer on Thursday in Tokyo," reports Mark Schilling for Variety. She was 87. In 1950, Awashima left the Takarazaka Revue Company for the Shochiku studio, where she'd appear in "a wide range of roles, though in the West she is best remembered as the vivacious, teasing friend of lead Setsuko Hara in such films as Early Summer (1951) and Early Spring (1956) or Michiko Kogure in The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), all by Ozu. She later transferred to the Toho studio, where she starred as the level-headed geisha wife of a merchant prince's dilatory son in Shiro Toyoda's Meioto Zenzai (1955); she reprised the role in the 1963 follow-up…. Her last film role was in Masahiro Kobayashi's 2010 drama Haru's Journey."

Awashima's...

Above: Street without End. Photo courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

In March the Criterion Collection released a quiet salvo of intervention into the sad state of home video distribution in the U.S. of films by Japanese studio master Mikio Naruse. After just a solitary release of the filmmaker (1960's masterpiece, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, also put out by Criterion) comes an Eclipse-label boxset of early 30s silent films by the director: Flunky, Work Hard! (1931), No Blood Relation (1932), Apart from You (1933), Every-Night Dreams (1933), and Street without End (1934). The set, Silent Naruse, instantly dramatically multiplies the number of titles available to American audiences—though sadly, as Dave Kehr recently implied in his review of the set for the New York Times, it isn't exactly a set of canonical masterpieces bound to invigorate and excite shocked discovery of a foreign master.

But then again, Naruse may be one of the...

For years now Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai has been ranked as one of the best movies ever made, and is usually considered one of the finest achievement in cinema. In the most recent Sight and Sound poll of the best films ever made, critics ranked it eleventh (its highest charting was in 1982 at #3) while filmmakers ranked it ninth. It’s ranked thirteenth on IMDb.com’s list of the greatest films of all time. Ain’t no denying that Kurosawa and his cast (including Toshiro Mifune) made a masterwork. And my review of The Criterion collection’s Seven Samurai after the jump.

A band of marauding Ronin spot a village and are about to raid it when their leader notes that the village’s crops won’t be ready for another couple of weeks. They ride off, but a villager hears their plans. After a discussion, the villagers decide...

Yasujiro Ozu's sublime family dramas hymned our ordinary bliss and everyday tragedy. Our film culture is now in danger of forgetting such jewels in our endless grasping for the smash-bang shallow spectacles of Avatar and its ilk

Family is where we learn everything, including the sweeping urge to be done with family. Family is a basis of every narrative art, even if it offers us the humbling insight that our lives are all so ordinary and alike as to be worthless or without lofty significance. For most of us, family determines who will be at our funeral, and with what mixed feelings. Family asserts that we are higher than animals, and is the undertone and the consideration that leaves every one of us, if not afraid, then stilled, as we go to bed at night.

You see, this is an unusual essay for a newspaper, for it deals with...