Japan and the Japanese

Jun 17, 2026 — Channel Calendars This month on the Criterion Channel, celebrate the hundredth birthday of the great Harry Dean Stanton, delight in the twists and thrills of our Murderous Melodramas collection, or binge the surreal cult-favorite TV series The Prisoner. There’s so...

Jun 16, 2026 — BAM presents twelve films ranging from the early 1960s through the late 1980s.

Jul 16, 2024 — In one of the most patient films he has ever made, Wim Wenders captures how everyday existence drifts into our dream lives.

May 17, 2022 — Juzo Itami’s tragicomic directorial debut has scandalous fun with the Japanese traditions governing death.

Apr 13, 2020 — The director of House, dozens of experimental films, and thousands of commercials returned again and again to the devastation of the Second World War.

Aug 31, 2018 — There’s a wistful sense of what might have been running through this week’s round of five.

Jun 18, 2007 — Yasujiro Ozu had already directed forty-five features by the time he started work on Early Spring, in 1955, but the artistic and commercial success of his previous film, Tokyo Story (1953), had rejuvenated him.

Jan 16, 2025 — Long considered lost, Fujisawa’s Bye Bye Love screens at Metrograph with two Teshigahara classics.

Nov 13, 2018 — Turning to theater for inspiration, Kenji Mizoguchi transformed a popular eighteenth-century play into a spiritually charged meditation on forbidden love and societal oppression.

Dec 18, 2016 — Imogen Sara Smith examines the tensions between tradition and modernity reflected in two silent crime films by Yasujiro Ozu and Tomu Uchida.