Review: Yasujirō Ozu's "Tokyo Story" remains towering and devastating
Movie of the Week #25 is one of the very best films ever made
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Of all the movies that are exhaustively evangelized to pupils in film school, Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story might be the one I sense the most resistance towards from students. I cannot say I don’t understand. A 136-minute Japanese film with a bare, simple narrative and a direct, demandingly pure style could not be farther removed from modern cinematic aesthetics (though finding any filmmaker quite like Ozu, in the entire canon of film history, is an impossible task to begin with), and it does not necessarily surprise me that others my age find the film more of a historical chore than an artistically vibrant masterwork.
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