All Recommendations
Early Summer
A 28-year-old single woman is pressured to marry.
Equinox Flower
Wataru Hirayama's outwardly liberal views on marriage are severely tested when his daughter declares that she is in love with a musician and is adamant to live life her own way, instead of agreeing to an arranged marriage. Outwitted by his female relatives, Hirayama stubbornly refuses to admit defeat.
An Autumn Afternoon
Shuhei Hirayama is a widower with a 24-year-old daughter. Gradually, he comes to realize that she should not be obliged to look after him for the rest of his life, so he arranges a marriage for her.
The End of Summer
The family of an older man who runs a small sake brewery become concerned with his finances and his health after they discover him visiting an old mistress from his youth.
Tokyo Twilight
Two sisters find out the existence of their long-lost mother, but the younger cannot accept the fact that she was abandoned as a child.
Sacco & Vanzetti
Boston, 1920. Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are charged and unfairly tried for murder on the basis of their anarchist political beliefs.
A Wife Confesses
Tied to a mountain between her brutalizing spouse and her secret lover, disaster strikes; the authorities accuse her of murder and prompt a confession.
Late Autumn
Anna learns in prison that her mother has passed away in Seattle. Prison officials grants Anna a three day furlough to attend her mother's funeral. Anna embarks on a long trip to Seattle. Hoon is a Korean immigrant who works as a gigolo. Hoon is now on the run from a wealthy client's furious husband. These two seemingly lost souls are about to share three memorable days together.
Always - Sunset on Third Street
Teenage Mutsuko comes to Tokyo for work but ends up at a repair shop. She befriends the owner's family. Neighbors Hiromi, writer Chagawa with admirer Junnosuke strive alongside them in postwar Tokyo's evolution.
Small Cuts
Bruno, a communist newspaper journalist, is suffering a mid-life crisis. Torn between his wife Gaëlle and his young girlfriend Nathalie, his political beliefs battered by the wind of history, Bruno seems to have lost his bearings.
Bad Seed
A young man-about-Paris, cut off from his father's money, falls in with a picaresque gang of car thieves.
El Aliento
Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji
Tragicomic road movie set during the Edo period. It follows a samurai, his two servants – including spear-carrier Genpachi – and the various people they meet on their journey, including a policeman in pursuit of a thief, a young child and a woman who is to be sold into prostitution.
An Elephant Sitting Still
In the northern Chinese city of Manzhouli, they say there is an elephant that simply sits and ignores the world. Manzhouli becomes an obsession for the protagonists of this film, a longed-for escape from the downward spiral in which they find themselves.
Oasis
A young man released from prison visits the widow of the man he killed drunk-driving and becomes infatuated with his cerebral palsy-stricken daughter.
Ninotchka
A stern Russian woman sent to Paris on official business finds herself attracted to a man who represents everything she is supposed to detest.
Onibaba
While her son, Kichi, is away at war, a woman and her daughter-in-law survive by killing samurai who stray into their swamp, then selling whatever valuables they find. Both are devastated when they learn that Kichi has died, but his wife soon begins an affair with a neighbor who survived the war, Hachi. The mother disapproves and, when she can't steal Hachi for herself, tries to scare her daughter-in-law with a mysterious mask from a dead samurai.
Good Morning
A lighthearted take on director Yasujiro Ozu’s perennial theme of the challenges of intergenerational relationships, Good Morning tells the story of two young boys who stop speaking in protest after their parents refuse to buy a television set. Ozu weaves a wealth of subtle gags through a family portrait as rich as those of his dramatic films, mocking the foibles of the adult world through the eyes of his child protagonists. Shot in stunning color and set in a suburb of Tokyo where housewives gossip about the neighbors’ new washing machine and unemployed husbands look for work as door-to-door salesmen, this charming comedy refashions Ozu’s own silent classic I Was Born, But . . . to gently satirize consumerism in postwar Japan.
Tokyo Story
The elderly Shukishi and his wife, Tomi, take the long journey from their small seaside village to visit their adult children in Tokyo. Their elder son, Koichi, a doctor, and their daughter, Shige, a hairdresser, don't have much time to spend with their aged parents, and so it falls to Noriko, the widow of their younger son who was killed in the war, to keep her in-laws company.
The Color Purple
A decades-spanning tale of love and resilience and of one woman's journey to independence. Celie faces many hardships in her life, but ultimately finds extraordinary strength and hope in the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.