Colibel Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Melanie Bouvet The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Lee Eisenberg "Banshun" ("Late Spring" in English) is the first Yasujiro Ozu movie that I've seen. If it's any indication, he's a great director. The movie focuses on the relationship between a father and daughter but in the grand scheme of things it looks at love and loss, and the general continuation of life and all things around us. Ozu made the movie in the context of the Allied Powers' occupation of Japan after the latter's defeat in World War II, and there are reminders of the occupation (such as a Coca-Cola ad). The father's insistence that his daughter get married reflects the new path that the Land of the Rising Sun would have to take now that its empire was gone.Although I'm not familiar with Ozu's work beyond this, I could detect some things that he did here. There were some low angles to simulate point of view shots, and what are called "pillow shots": a single shot or multiple shots of objects employed to transition between scenes. There's also a scene of a vase, and I understand that Ozu featured such a shot in every one of his movies. The vase could represent stasis, creating a contrast with the movie's theme of change (inherent in its season-themed title). And then there's the question of tradition. The daughter is supposed to get married, but she has been resisting this: the general continuation of things might not last. Because of this, one interpretation is that the movie is a critique of marriage.Whatever the case, I hope to see more of Ozu's work. I'll probably have to see the other installments in his Noriko trilogy first.

chaos-rampant Ozu by now had reached a sublime maturity in his eye. This flew in the back of two decades of film work of course, it's why I think Ozu continued in the silent format longer than his peers, slowly evolving that eye. The achievement is not in any impeccable composing he does, I'm not interested in an aesthetic look of him. I'm for looking for images that vibrate with a more fleeting sense of life that hides in them, that Buddhist nothingness or nonself that is Ozu's gravestone message (the ideogram "mu" is inscribed there).The film is all about the inevitable necessity of having to go, about separation and stepping out on your own for the long journey of life. In a slightly different context it would have been about death. Here it's marriage, the daughter having to abandon the idyllic childhood home where she lived with her father for so long and open up to the world.I'll keep with me two marvelous scenes that encapsulate this: at the shrine near the end where father and daughter are waving to each other from opposite banks of a stream, and back in their room as they pack up their things and prepare to go, it's as if a last farewell is understood, quietly hanging in the corner of the room. All you need to know is right there in these scenes, powerfully conveyed with resonance, each one a parting memory.On the other hand a forward-looking sense about the future is missing in the girl, an even mildly curious excitement as ambiguous counterpoint to the sadness, something constructive about the journey ahead. Leaving her simply crushed and resigned that she must go gives me a somewhat unpleasant sense, an almost neurotic childishness in the character. Here I encounter again Ozu's persistent flaw from previous films, made all the more obvious because he is so refined by now in every other respect. The realization of why she must go doesn't spring from inside, it does not dissolve visually in the air. It comes in a long instructive speech by the father. Ozu's eye is clear, the story is lucid flow. But the deeper point is resolved as ordinary drama, from the outside.This makes me all the more curious about his next films in this his more celebrated period. These flaws are interdependent, inner realization in the story and wholly cinematic brushstroke from it. Both are a matter of meditating, of embodying the insight rather than saying it out loud. So it might be that this is only the first step of a larger journey about a character like Noriko, that Ozu grows himself as he looks to sculpt a more effusive insight about being. The titles of some of his later films imply a connectedness. I pick up the thread there.

valadas The Japanese people are gentle, nice and polite and plentiful of good feelings. They respect the best values in family and society. Ties between children and parents are very deep. This movie shows that atmosphere in a remarkable way through beautiful and delicate scenes of sociability and intimacy and some dialogues of restrained emotion. A daughter who has already passed the age in which she should have married, lives with her widowed father taking care of him. But her father and her aunt keep pressing her for getting married soon because they think that will be for her own happiness and because socially she should already have done that. Particularly the aunt is engaged in getting her a fiancé. She is however very reluctant on that matter since she feels very happy living with his father and taking care of him. She ends up by yielding to his father's entreaties feeling very sorrowful although she tries to seem cheerful at the idea. Her father even recognizes he would like to have his daughter with him but feels that children must go and leave their families when they become adults. The movie ends on the wedding day (whose ceremony we don't watch not even we ever see the bridegroom since this is not important by the movie's goals). There are two scenes particularly dramatic though in very restrained attitudes. First while the bride is getting dressed in typical Japanese attire for the wedding ceremony not showing any signs of cheerfulness and the last scene when the father comes back home alone and sits down feeling silently his loneliness making us feel deeply the girl's absence where she was so lively before. The movie viewer feels very deeply what goes in their minds and hearts while watching these scenes. The performers know well to communicate their feelings to us without great explosive dramatic scenes. They do a great job at that. This movie was classified recently by a team of British critics as one of the 100 best movies ever made.

commanderblue "Late Spring" is Yasujiro Ozu's stunningly poignant portrait of a 27-year-old daughter who lives with her 56-year old father in post-World War II Japan. A film with a deeper meaning than its simple story implies, "Late Spring" is like the neorealist version of Japanese films, in that it tells a story larger than life with few but memorable characters.Another spring comes to a little town not far outside of Tokyo, Japan. At the same time another woman is getting married and Ozu opens up with a marriage ritual with beautiful women garnered in kimonos as the ceremony unfolds. Outside the wind gently blows and sways the leaves and trees back and forth. The flowers are in bloom. Ozu makes it clear that marriage is not just a ritual but a tradition like the seasons.The central character is Noriko, a 27-year old unmarried woman who lives by her father's side. She knows him just as well as he knows her, and Ozu creates a humble home environment through their natural interactions. "I'm home!" Noriko will announce. "Have you had anything to eat yet, Father?" Noriko, we discover, not only feeds and cleans and cares for her father but occupies a very important hole in his life. This is more than a father and daughter relationship but one that thrives without a mother figure. Ozu never reveals the cause of her death, but this is a daughter without a mother and a husband without a wife. For that, they are inexplicably bound.Noriko's Auntie always attends the nuptials and sees it as the time for Noriko to be married. She cannot be blamed for this. The Aunt, a widow herself, is a woman bound by tradition and thinks if her niece avoids marriage any longer her chance of a fruitful, wholesome life shall be tainted (hence, late spring). The Aunt almost urgently wants Noriko to marry. For Shukichi, the father, letting go is a little harder.Noriko is unmarried but not without a social life. On weekly commutes to Tokyo she meets up with Mr. Onodera, a family friend. Often, they'll window shop together and finish with shots of sake while Noriko gently but wittily quips about Onodera's second marriage. Noriko is also friends with Mr. Hattori, her father's young work assistant. Hattori could be a potential husband, and they get along fine biking down the beach together, except Hattori is engaged to be married and that's the misery of it.Lastly, there's Noriko's friend, Aya, who came from the same educational upbringing but married earlier in life. Aya has experience which is not so much an advantage over Noriko but something more to talk about. "I don't want to get married," Noriko says and Aya is appalled. Aya argues her divorce only made her stronger. Noriko sees this as a weakening of the human spirit.Setsuko Hara, who plays Noriko, is not only a beautiful woman but a fine actress. She smiles ear-to-ear throughout the picture and it's amazing that somebody could look so happy. Only when there's talk of marriage does that smile begin to dissipate and Noriko ruefully laments she'd rather have an eternity with her father. "You don't find happiness," her father says. "You create it." Marriage is unique because for every bond that's joined another is broken. "Late Spring" testifies to that, and it tells it so well, without superfluous sentiment, that the result is a picture so compelling it touches the deepest corners of our hearts.