Kinuyo Tanaka

This haunting, kabuki-inflected version of a Japanese folk legend is set in a remote mountain village, where food is scarce and tradition dictates that citizens who have reached their seventieth year must be carried to the summit of Mount Narayama and left there to die. The sacrificial elder at the center of the tale is Orin, a dignified and dutiful woman who spends her dwindling days securing the happiness of her loyal widowed son with a respectable...

In sixteenth-century Japan a village potter and his brother-in-law set out for the city to seek their fortunes in the spoils of war. Their neglected wives suffer the bitter consequences of their husbands' ambition as one is murdered by soldiers and the other is raped and becomes a prostitute.

"By the time he made Ugetsu, Kenji Mizoguchi was already an elder statesman of Japanese cinema, fiercely revered by Akira Kurosawa and other younger directors of a younger generation. And with this exquisite ghost story, a fatalistic wartime tragedy derived from stories by Akinari Ueda and Guy de Maupassant, he created a touchstone of his art, his long takes and sweeping camera guiding the viewer through a delirious narrative about two villagers whose...

In Ozu's first color film, a stubborn businessman with traditional views is faced with a modern-minded daughter and her nontraditional fiance.