Yasujiro Ozu

A troupe of travelling players arrive at a small seaport in the south of Japan. Komajuro Arashi, the aging master of the troupe, goes to visit his old flame Oyoshi and their son Kiyoshi, even though Kiyoshi believes Komajuro is his uncle (imdb)

An elderly couple journey to Tokyo to visit their children and are confronted by indifference, ingratitude and selfishness... (imdb)

After moving to the suburbs of Tokyo two brothers struggle to fit in at their new school. Their father, who made the move to have more in common with his boss, tries to help them become self assured while encountering similar problems at work.

In postwar Tokyo, this household is loving and serene: older parents, their 28-year-old daughter Noriko, their married son, his devoted wife, and two rascally sons. (imdb)

A kabuki actor's mistress hatches a jealous plot to bring down her lover's son.

Somiya was an old widower with a daughter, named Noriko, mature for marriage but would rather live with her father... (imdb)

This movie takes a look at a very Westernized subarban Japan in the late 50's. It focuses mainly on the daily lives of a small community and the way its members interact (imdb)

A young man and his wife struggle within the confines of their passionless relationship while he has an extramarital romance.

The great actress and Ozu regular Setsuko Hara plays a mother gently trying to persuade her daughter to marry in this glowing portrait of family love and conflict (DVD Beaver)

Shuhei Hirayama is a widower with a 24-year old daughter. He gradually comes to realize that she should not be obliged to look after him for the rest of his life, and so he arranges a marriage for her. (imdb)

In post-war Japan, a man brings a lost boy to his tenement. No one wants to take the child for even one night; finally, a sour widow, Tané, does. The next day, complaining, she takes the boy to his neighborhood and finds his father has gone to Tokyo; it seems the boy has been abandoned. Tané wants to leave him there, but he follows her home... (imdb)

Ozu creates a picture about an entire family, enriching the several strands of his story with many anecdotes. The film is unusually rich in character vignettes: at the same time it is one of the director's bleakest films.

A young Japanese mother must prostitute herself while her husband is away. When he returnns, her shocking secret changes both of their lives for ever.

Two sisters live with their father. The younger sister is embroiled in an affair and becomes pregnant. The elder sister has run away from her husband and returned with her child to her parent's home. Both sisters are astonished when their mother, long thought dead, turns up alive. The sisters are even more stunned when they learn what their mother's life has been. (imdb)

A business man is often approached by friends for advice and help regarding marriage as well as family and romantic relationships. He is always very calmly and objectively able to give great insight and assistance to these particular situations. However, when it comes time for him to be objective regarding his oldest daughter, he finds it very difficult... (imdb)

In 1923, in the province of Shinshu, the widow and simple worker of a silk factory Tsune Nonomiya (O-Tsune) decides to send her only son to Tokyo for having a better education. Thirteen years later, she visits her son Ryosuke Nonomiya (Shinichi Himori), and finds that he is a poor and frustrated night-school teacher with a wife, Sugiko (Yoshiko Tsubouchi), and a baby boy. (imdb)

Takeo, a capricious wife from Tokyo high-society, is bored by her dull husband, a quiet and reliable company executive raised in the country (Shin Saburi) After a crisis, she understands better his true value. A parallel sub-plot shows her niece rebelling against the tradition of arranged marriages. (imdb)

The film opens as an effective heist drama pastiche, with Okada trussing up bank clerks and dodging the long shadows of a police dragnet, fox-like; we follow him home to his wife and their critically ill baby daughter, as does a wily police chief. As captor and prey sit out the night, waiting for the child's recovery, the scene is set for a claustrophobic battle of nerves. (timeout.com)

After the death of his wife, a man struggles to raise his son in nearly overwhelming poverty. When the father meets a beautiful young woman, the son becomes jealous of his father's attentions, and conflict arises between them. (imdb)

A young salary-man loses his white-collar insurance job trying to cover for an aging colleague. Unfortunately, it is 1931 and the Great Depression means few other employment opportunities. He has difficulty covering the expenses of his family. After misadventures, he runs into his former professor, now a health food café owner, who promises him aid if the young man assists him with the café.

Ryoichi and Chikako are brother and sister. They live together. Chikako works during the day in a office and at night she prostitutes herself to fund her brother's studies in university. (imdb)

This is a story about a gangster and his girl friend who used to be a good girl.

It tells the story of an unemployed and homeless single father (Takeshi Sakamoto) with two sons looking for work in depression-era Tokyo, whose lives intersects with those of a single mother of a little daughter likewise forlornly seeking a way (and a place) to live. (imdb)

This film involves a wife and her professor husband and niece. The niece is a liberal woman who rebel against her. There is a clash between the wife and her niece on women's value and how women should be behave.

This is a story about a young son who need to work overseas and he had to left his mother and his youngest sister to the care of his married brothers and sisters. When he is back to visit his mother, he was dismayed by how his mother and sister were treated by his siblings. He gave his siblings and in-laws a good tongue lashing and decided to take care of his mother and sister himself.

Shuhei Horikawa, a poor schoolteacher, struggles to raise his son Ryohei by himself, despite neither money nor prospects. (imdb)

This movie takes place almost in the same environment with very little changes, students bedrooms, mountain resort, sky sloops and bedrooms again. The external scenes are unfortunately a little bit spoilt by the early cinema technology, but still there are some rather catching shoots, one worthy considering is the one where the directors shoots the young man and the wanted lady from behind while they are side by side enjoying the landscape. (imdb)

Ozu's follow-up to I GRADUATED, BUT... actually plays somewhat like a prequel: a student fails when the shirt on which he wrote his exam cheat sheet gets mistakenly sent to the laundry. The student contemplates his outcast fate as his graduating dorm-mates all face the working world. (imdb)

A college graduate is unable to find a job but tries to hide his unemployment from his wife and fiancee. (imdb)

This eccentric comedy of manners follows a love quadrangle centered on a kendo master (Tokihiko Okada), whose chauvinistic upholding of Japanese culture screeches to a halt when he falls for a progressive (but not too progressive) office worker. He shaves his beard (after protesting memorably that "all great men have beards!" including Lincoln, Darwin and Marx), puts on a suit and learns the Western ways of wooing a woman, attracting a haughty aristocrat and a gangster floozy in the process. (imdb)

Ozu revisits the dichotomy between schoolboy idealism and working world realities, this time focusing on four college friends, one of whom (Tatsuo Saito) happens to be the son of a corporate executive; the son takes over upon his father's death, and his friends come seeking employment. Their friendship clearly isn't the same under this new working relationship, the subordinates become yes-men to the point that one of them says nothing when Saito casts an eye on his fiance. (imdb)

Kenji is a small thief who likes drinking and fighting. When he falls in love with sweet and simple Yazue, and she finds out what kind of guy he really is, she leaves him 'until he becomes an honest person'. But it is not easy to get rid of one's past... (imdb)

Takeshi Sakamoto and Tatsuo Saito are two bumbling child kidnappers (Sakamoto carries a butterfly net if that gives you an idea of his skill level) who abduct a boy (Tomio Aoki, Japan's Dennis the Menace) who turns out to be more than they bargained for. Pieces of this slapstick crime caper based on O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief" are missing throughout, but it still plays coherently and has its share of hilarious moments. (imdb)

After the husband dies of a heart attack, widowed Chieko selflessly devotes herself to the raising of the son and stepson Sadao. Her unconscious refusal to deal with Sadao finally uncovers the secret of his parentage, he tries to quit the family and live on his own. The prologue in which the father dies at the office, showed their former happy domestic life and the epilogue the reconciliation with mother after the traumatic central section. (dvdbeaver)

Setsuko is unhappily to Mimura, an engineer with no job and a bad drinking habit. She had always been in love with Hiroshi but both of them failed to propose when Hiroshi left for France a few years ago. Now he is back and Mariko (Setsuko's sister) tries to reunite them. She too is secretly in love with Hiroshi. (imdb)

The lion dance in traditional Japanese theatre.

This early short (and silent) film by Japanese master Ozu seems to be the perfect illustration for XVIIth century French poet Jean de La Fontaine's fable "The Two Cocks" : "Two cocks in peace were living, when / A war was kindled by a hen." It is the simple story of two friends who live together in a poor tenement and who share about everything in life (food, hopes, work...). Everything goes well until they gallantly rescue a young (and pretty) woman injured in a road accident. (imdb)

Okada and Kato, students at 'W' [i.e. Waseda] University, in Tokyo, live in the same lodgings. One morning, Kato receives a tailor's bill. Okada has seen the letter arrive, so Kato tells ... (imdb)

A gangster tries to find redemption with the inadvertent help of an innocent shop girl and his jealous girlfriend will do anything to keep him. The family of an older man who runs a small sake brewery become concerned with his finances and his health after they discover him visiting an old mistress ... (imdb)