Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director

Sep 13, 2016 — Kenji Mizoguchi achieved the sublime with this structurally complex portrait of artistic ambition and female subjugation.

Dec 9, 2013 — The critic and WCP executive director offers a personal take on art cinema and a primer on the project’s scope and mission.

Apr 19, 2004 — “Floating weeds, drifting down the leisurely river of our lives,” has long been a favored metaphor in Japanese prose and poetry. This plant, the ukigusa (duckweed in English), floating aimlessly, carried by stronger currents, is seen as emblematic of our...

Jul 19, 2022 — Centered on a grieving theater director and his driver, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning drama is a quiet meditation on the mysteries of communication, the flexibility of truth, and the search for honesty.

Jun 5, 1995 — Kenji Mizoguchi departed abruptly from his earlier sentimental films into a world of acute realism with this bold critique of the position of women in contemporary Japanese society.

Mar 21, 2011 — Living Room The cinema of Mikio Naruse is one of heartbreak but also one of indomitable poise. Melodrama is the director’s stock-in-trade. His stories are inhabited by people, generally women, imprisoned in their domestic and professional circumstances by the status...

May 6, 2025 — A two-part, thirty-film retrospective opens in New York before traveling to Berkeley, Harvard, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Mar 17, 2022 — New restorations of the six films directed by the renowned actress will screen from coast to coast.

Apr 24, 2019 — Channel Calendars The Women (1939) It’s going to be a packed month on the Criterion Channel, with a spotlight on the unforgettable female characters of a classic Hollywood master, a tribute to the great Japanese cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, a new...

Mar 16, 2009 — This long-underappreciated giant of Japanese cinema was an innovative visual stylist and a born storyteller who preferred to make films about outsiders.