People are voting emotionally.

hyped garbage

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Perfection perfection perfection! This is the penultimate film by the one filmmaker that somehow always continues to amaze me and reassert the power cinema has. It's like reading a haiku by Bashô, or a poem by Merwin. Something made in a different time and place, yet still so strongly present in the here and now.Regardless of the pervasive and thoroughly Ozuesque marriage dealings, this film is really about death. Its imminence, immutability. Its invisibility. The comedy, of which there's plenty, is balanced and ultimately cancelled out by what unfolds, and the final funeral procession is worthy of Welles' "Othello" (1952) in its bleak finality, and that smoke from the crematorium is among the darkest and most beautiful metaphors in all of Ozu — our life vanishes with our body either into the ground, or as is appropriate in the Japanese culture, into thin air. It vanishes. For a moment a kind of an emblem of it lingers in the air, and then even that token is gone.And as only Ozu can, there's always the comic undersong, no matter how dark the waters we're treading. (This works both ways, mind!) The past is on its way out, the present is colliding with the future. It's the old paterfamilias who's growing into a child again, rekindling an old flame, failing to act his age at the gate of death, and it's the daughter who tells him off (the brother all tight-lipped and spooked about mentioning it, failing to step up. As is often the case, the females are perfectly capable of coping not their own, thank you very much.I think Ozu's impact is the strongest when I'm away from him for a while. Then I get used to other ways of seeing things, yet when I go back to him the effect is stupendous: how he frames a shot of a doorway, a train station, of what seems to be the most "insignificant" transitory shot between scenes is beyond words. But it's always in that which many of us find "insignificant" where he finds a whole new universe waiting to be explored, and cherished. The beauty of his cinema is why I love film. It's the great friendship that lasts.Seeing as the BFI are either incapable or unwilling to complete their Ozu project and might not actually have the rights to this film anyway, and now that Criterion have pushed from the mainline into the Eclipse, I wonder when we might see a decent Blu-ray of this wonderful film.

When an artist has reached a level of such high art that he and his work can be spoken of as being in the top tier of his art form something terrible happens: often brilliant but not quite ineffably so, work, in its own right, is looked upon with a lesser eye by critics and audiences alike. Not that this is not a natural development, for once treated to fancy cuisine, even a good steak can seem a comedown to most palates, but it is a frustrating development, for sometimes quality is overlooked, or dismissed because it is merely an 8 of 10, rather than a perfect 10. Such is the case concerning the critical reception of Yasujiro Ozu's 1961 film The End Of Summer (Kohayagawa-ke No Aki, or, literally, The Fall Of The Kohayagawa Family).In fairness, and to be up front, it simply is not an unassailably great film, like his great Noriko Trilogy films (Late Spring, Early Summer, Tokyo Story) are, but it is an excellent film, in its own right, which knows when to not let a scene play out, and which, at 103 minutes, never goes on too long itself. And sometimes there is a small thing in a film that serves as a fractal for the larger film. In the case of The End Of Summer it is the appearance of a character named Noriko, but one not played by the great actress Setsuko Hara- who played the Noriko characters in the earlier trilogy. perhaps it was some god of cinema's karmic hand, but the fact that Hara is called Akiko shows how just slightly off from greatness this whole film is. Another thing that augurs the slight fall from grace of this film is its musical score by Toshiro Mayuzumi. Whereas all aspects of the earlier film were in perfect harmony, Mayuzumi's score is often light and comic in inappropriate moments. When it is needed to be comic it serves well, but a listener almost feels like the scorer fell asleep during editing, and let the same whimsical tunes play on too long her, or too much in places it should not be at all.The acting is stellar. Ganjiro Nakamura, who was so great in Ozu's Floating Weeds (1959), is a delight to watch. Hara, as the widowed daughter, brings an ineffable grace to her role, even if it is a familiar one. The rest of the family's portrayers also have their moments to shine, including some terrific cameos from one of Ozu's great regulars, Chishu Ryu, as one of the peasants commenting on the old man's death, Haruko Sugimura, another regular, as Manbei's sister Katou- although this time in a cheerier role, and even Manbei's grandson, Fumiko's son, Masao (Masahiko Shimazu, who played the devilish little Isamu in Good Morning), has a memorable sequence where he plays games with the old man.The DVD is part of The Criterion Collection's third affordable Eclipse Series called Late Ozu, and also includes Early Spring, Equinox Flower, Late Autumn, and Tokyo Twilight, but has no extra features, save a small essay on the inside of the DVD case. The film is shown in the original 1.33:1 aspect ration and is stunningly transferred. The subtitles are in black and white, which works better against color films, but Criterion really needs to get their act together on subtitles and English dubbed soundtracks. And while I understand the desire to get affordable versions of films out there, are a few extras really going to break the bank? I mean, even a trailer and five or ten minute Making Of featurette is de rigueur in even B film DVD releases these days.Nonetheless, this is a film that gets a hardy recommendation. Is it the best that the Master ever offered? No. Has it familiar elements? Yes. Does it have a few moments that clunk, which would not have made the cut in his masterpieces? Yes. But it is still a fabulous film, leagues above 99.9% or more of films ever made, and one that shows that even the simplest and seemingly most banal material, in the hands of a great artist, can make one laugh and cry, and sometimes do both at once. The End Of Summer may have come at the end of its main character's and creator's lives, but it shows that Yasujiro Ozu was still fertile creatively, and his untimely and early death impoverished the world, art in general, and cinema of a voice and eye that centuries hence will still have relevance. Not bad for a second tier work of art, eh?

This beautiful, haunting film takes place at the end of a hot Japanese summer that, as one of the characters puts it, "refuses to end." The mournful sound of cicadas accompanies the series of tableaux about the scion of the Namakura family, a whimsical widower who continues to see the mistress who caused his late wife and currently cause his three daughters a lot of sorrow. The film is about the impracticality and unpredictability of love in opposition to a rigid social order. Two of Namakura's daughters share their father's ambivalence about marriage. The older daughter, herself a widow, hesitates to re-marry. Although she embraces traditional values, she treasures her life "as it is," and values the freedom she now has as a single woman. Another daughter prefers to marry for love, rather than go with the dull, practical man her family has chosen for her. Only one daughter has a traditional marriage, but she's the most angry and outspoken to her father about his mistress. The film is also about the contrasts between the old and, "New Japan," the English words written on a flashing neon sign glimpsed on an anonymous city street. Despite his eccentricities, Namakura was a good businessman who kept the family sake business afloat; he could straddle both the old and new worlds. This is a physically gorgeous film, filled with humble domestic scenes that radiate the light of Vermeer and Dutch genre paintings. Ozu shows tremendous respect for women and the humble work they do--washing, sewing, cooking. It's work that is usually unseen and under-appreciated, so it's a pleasure to see it honored here.

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.