Roger Ebert on Ozu

Short Takes

Apr 5, 2013 We will miss our friend Roger Ebert, who died yesterday at age seventy. In honor of this very special man and most beloved and influential of film critics, we would like to share with you the first four minutes of...

Apr 17, 2012 Maybe it is something to do with the sensual seductiveness of cinema: as new-millennium Americans, we care nothing for Japa­nese poetry, little for Japanese painting and fiction, and certainly too much for Japanese cartoons, and yet Yasujiro Ozu, the least...

Apr 17, 2012 Few directors have as precise and recognizable a style as Yasujiro Ozu, sometimes called the father of Japanese cinema. Film scholars have studied and dissected that style for years, and filmmakers imitated it. One artist particularly moved by Ozu’s elegant...

This patient observer of everyday life in Japan has been enormously influential among filmmakers seeking a cinema of economy and poetry.

Oct 28, 2017 We begin with a few translations. Asymptote lives up to its own billing as “the premier site for world literature in translation” with the presentation of Adam Kuplowsky’s renderings in English of some observational work by Yasujiro Ozu. “These three...

May 22, 2017 A portrait of childhood, domestic life, and consumerism in postwar suburban Tokyo, Yasujiro Ozu’s Good Morning is one of the Japanese master’s most charming and subtly incisive comedies. Made in 1959, this loose update of the director’s own 1932 silent...

Nov 19, 2013 There are few people in the world we would rather hear talk about the beauty of Yasujiro Ozu’s cinema than Donald Richie. One of the world’s foremost scholars on Japanese film and culture, Richie, who died earlier this year, appears...

Apr 26, 2011 Good news for admirers of Adrian Tomine’s simply gorgeous illustrations for the Criterion two-DVD special edition of Yasujiro Ozu’s The Only Son and There Was a Father: the artist has joined forces with art and literary comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly to...

Shifting POVs

The Daily

Jun 5, 2026 We’re wrapping the week with conversations with Lilly Wachowski, Shunji Iwai, and Tsui Hark as well as essays on Ozu and Ghatak.

Mar 27, 2026 Featuring pairings of David Bowie and Nicolas Roeg, Jerry Lewis and Jean-Luc Godard, and Caroline Golum and the Middle Ages.

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