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While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Of the Ozu films I've seen this one seems to stand out the most; there isn't a single shot of a train, only the sound of distant ones passing. There are attempts at arranging marriages, for a young woman and for a widow, but neither come to fruition. He almost throws a curve ball so to speak, since at the beginning of the film you're given the impression that it's going to be about two widows getting' the hook up, but then it turns out to be more of a study on the widowed father of the Kohayagawa family. There's also one more thing I've yet to have seen in an Ozu film, as far as I can remember: a dead person on screen, usually we're entering the stories of these people's lives after someone has croaked. Definitely the most bittersweet of the Ozu films I've seen thus far, there are moments of genuinely touching comedy and also a few moments of blatant commentary on the modernization of the Japanese woman at the time, with the one daughter whose only regret after her "father" dies is that she doesn't get the mink stole she wanted, not to mention she's going out with a new American guy every other day.

Ozu's penultimate film is also one of his best. As in many of his movies, the theme here deals with the dynamics of a traditional Japanese family. The aging patriarch of a family has to deal with marrying his two grown daughters (one is divorced with child, the great Setsuko Hara), the financial problems facing his small sake producing business, the reunion with his long lost lover and their capricious daughter and, last but not least, his impending death. The death theme hangs throughout the movie; Ozu was probably thinking of his own death when he filmed this (he would live only a couple of years more); the last shot has black crows standing over the patriarch's gravestone. Ozu's films in color are even better than those in black and white: his famous sense of composition shines even better. Besides, I love color films from the late 1950s and early 1960s period, perhaps because they show us what society look like before the great disruption of the late 60s (this is not personal nostalgia, since I wasn't even born then). Overall, one of Ozu's best films.

This is classic Ozu, a small slice of life, a crucial turning point in the history of a family fighting the inevitable progress of time and change. In this case it is a family consisting of a widower, clearly someone with a racy past, and his four children - a somewhat dim son, two dutiful older daughters, and a sharp tongued younger daughter, outraged that her father is determined to age disgracefully. He (played by the impish Ganjiro Nakamura) is sneaking off from his duties at his struggling sake brewery to meet an old flame. His eldest daughter, in true later Ozu style is reluctant to accept the hand of an apparently decent suitor. His second daughter is torn between the 'good' match and her true love, an impoverished academic.Ozu's penultimate film, and perhaps this is reading too much into it, but its hard not to see his vision of his own impending death in it, despite the great humour in it.This is a meditation on a dying world - despite the vibrant photography, the film resonates with images of passing - constant visions of graveyards, an old dying Japan, the families roots in a dying form of business as they are overtaken by big, highly capitalised larger companies. The ending is sad and inevitable, but not tragic - life does go on, and a new generation wills step in, even if the old traditions are not maintained.One striking thing about this film is the incredible photography. Have humble domestic interiors every looked so stunningly beautiful? The lighting is luminous, every scene is as perfectly composed as a Vermeer painting.

After his second experience with colour, a light, happy "Ohayo", secretly epic and impressed, Ozu shot one of the milestones of his career: "Kohayagawa-ke no aki" is in my recollection, with "Banshun" and "Munakata shimai", his best work. Most of the themes exposed in previous films (father's intervention in his daughters' lifes, love (in the hands of others), solitude) are here integrated in a comedy-structured film that becomes a drama. It's perhaps his unique melodrama and it is shown with the desperate of the last breath for some characters, as usual in Ozu, doubtful and seeking a place for their quiet happiness.There is no Ozu film nearest Sirk's or Minneli's universe like this one.