Woody Allen has been playing a joke on us all these years and in his new film Match Point he finally cops to it.
Apart from You is finally all frustrated anticipation, nowhere more evident than in the climactic train station farewell.
Traveling Actors remains Mikio Naruse’s out-and-out funniest work, a comedy of numerous surface pleasures that unexpectedly deepens in retrospect.
The film’s stylistic crudities explicitly illustrate what, in Mikio Naruse’s later work, is relegated to subtlety and subtext.
The best moments of A Wife’s Heart involve things not said or seen.
Throughout, Mikio Naruse shows his considerable skill at portraying household dynamics.
The film is an unfortunately strained effort, a sprawling, yet detached familial soap opera with an atypical country setting.
Husband and Wife is one of director Mikio Naruse’s stranger films.
The film is a loving portrait of a woman tragically caught between her wants and her responsibilities.
The drama builds slowly, playing out against the backdrop of a polite Japanese society where few speak their mind.
Flowing feels supremely indebted and connected to Eastern Buddhism’s karmic path toward enlightenment.
Mikio Naruse slowly distances us from his lovers and their actions so that the film’s climactic progression of events hits us all the more fiercely.
It’s to Mikio Naruse’s credit that he clearly doesn’t favor any one of his characters over another.
Setsuko Hara in Sudden Rain uses her trademark beatific grin as a kind of Noh-theater disguise masking a virulent emotional undercurrent.
In tenor, The Approach of Autumn recalls the stark, light-touch despondency of Morris Engel’s Little Fugitive.
The film is something of a dull slog through territory better covered in Mikio Naruse’s prior Sudden Rain.
Stitched together from a variety of disparate elements, The Legend of Zorro is a frustrating hodgepodge of a movie.
Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies promises more than it finally delivers.
Of all the acknowledged masters of cinema, the Japanese director Mikio Naruse is perhaps the one least known in the West.
Hirohito in Aleksandr Sokurov’s staggering and brilliant The Sun is a man trying desperately, though honorably, to avoid an inevitable turn of the tide.