GrimPrecise I'll tell you why so serious

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

WILLIAM FLANIGAN Viewed on DVD. Restoration = ten (10) stars. The story line (yet again) deals with the conflicts arising from twenty-something, unmarried (and attractive) daughters living with (and focused on caring for) aging widowed fathers (who need to get on with their lives). To say that Director Yasujiro Ozu was obsessed with variation on this theme would be a vast understatement. He kept making essentially the same film over and over (trying to get things right or just stuck in a non-creative funk?) with translated titles often including the name of a season. Sort of like a TV series with one episode per season (pun intended). But the version presented in this film is the best of the bunch. The same old story line is significantly punched up with a robust, imaginative script offering a wide variety of plot-related and tangential events (including the game of Go which is rarely--if ever--seen in the "classical" Japanese cinema), and often amusing scenes populated by engaging character actors in cameo appearances. And the pacing is "brisk," at least by this Director's standards. The film also reflects fascinating aspects of contemporary Japanese life and culture (circa early 1960's). Many of the same actors and actresses appear in this film as they have in others of the series, but mostly play different roles (as is usually the case). The male lead actor (Chishu Ryu) turns in another stunning performance. Same interiors, scenes and sequence of scenes, and even shots and sequence of shots as employed in prior films. Music is heard during most of the movie, and resembles film scores from the European cinema and, especially, the Italian cinema of the era. Kimonos look exquisite, even the "everyday" ones. Cinematography (color) and sound are fine. Visual effects are primitive. Subtitles are indispensable for helping with the Western dialect used throughout the film. A keeper. WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

gavin6942 An aging widower arranges a marriage for his only daughter.This was the final film of Ozu, who had been making great cinema for decades. His 1930s silent crime dramas are excellent, and everything after is worth a watch. For his final film, it gets a bit more modern. We have a young woman who really is not all that interested in getting married. How can it be that finding a suitable husband is not the first thing on hr mind? The framing and colors are excellent, and very much evoke the best of the 1960s. How Japan was different from other places at the time I do not know, but in some ways the worlds do not seem far apart. This could take place at an American office in the 50s or 60s. Well, without the bowing, anyway.

David Conrad Ozu made the same movie again and again, so it is perhaps no surprise that his final one is arguably the best of all. In "Sanma no Aji," Ozu balances all of the usual themes of his films—generation gaps, the different aspirations of men and women in Japanese society, changing attitudes toward consumerism, and the absent presence of the Pacific war in Japan's collective memory—with his exceptional finesse and customary sensitivity. In this outing the discussions of the war are more overt than usual, though they extend no further than the drunken reminiscences of old men in a restaurant. These few, understated scenes are crucial: the war was the great break after which virtually nothing in Japan would be the same, and the rift it creates between the collective memories of the young and the old is in many ways the proximate cause of the movie's more visible and contemporary rifts: the rifts of lifestyle in Japan's postwar economic environment. The film is best appreciated with some knowledge of its historical background, but casual fans of Japanese cinema should find much to enjoy as well. Daisuke Kato, recognizable from Kurosawa movies like "Seven Samurai," has a remarkable turn as Ryu's nostalgic drinking companion and former military subordinate.

Howard Schumann An Autumn Afternoon, the final film by the great Yasujiro Ozu, is a portrayal of family interaction and conflict that provides a moving summation of a career that produced 53 films in 60 years. Similar in theme to his 1949 film Late Spring, a widowed father, Shuhei Hirayama, portrayed by the wonderful Chishu Ryu, wants his 24-year old daughter, Michiko, (Shima Iwashima) to marry but fears loneliness. After the death of her mother, as is traditional in Japanese families, Michiko has assumed her role, taking care of household chores and making sure that her father's needs are met. She feels no urge to marry and prefers to remain at home. Much of An Autumn Afternoon consists of small vignettes of family life. One of these involves Hirayama's son Koichi (Keiji Sada) and his wife Akiko (Mariko Okada. Both seem to mirror the encroaching consumer values of the new Tokyo lit up with neon lights, Coca-Cola signs, and rooftop golf. They bicker about finances, borrow money from their parents, and talk about buying expensive golf clubs and leather handbags on installment. The film has moments of delightful humor. Hirayama spends a great amount of time at a bar run by a woman who looks like his former wife, reminiscing about the good old days and listening to a military march from World War II. In one of the funniest scenes, he talks to a former shipmate who tells him that if Japan had won the war, American women would be playing Japanese musical instruments and wearing geisha style wigs and they both agree that it was better that Japan lost. When one of Hirayama's employees tells him she is leaving to get married, he begins to wonder whether or not it is also the time for Michiko. When Hirayama's friend Kawai (Nobuo Nakamura) proposes a match for Michiko, however, he does not tell his daughter about it, thinking there is plenty of time. The situation is crystallized when he has a reunion with an old school teacher Sakuma, (Eijiro Tono) known as "The Gourd" and notices how guilty his friend feels for not insisting that his daughter Tomoko marry when she had the opportunity. The result is an acceptance of the inevitable and the sadness that goes along with it. As An Autumn Afternoon ends, the camera pans around an empty room. We see an old man sitting on a chair, his head in his hands, weeping quietly. In his final moment of grace, Ozu has given us another experience that will last a lifetime.