Critic Reviews

Hardly anything actually happens, and yet it's one of the most emotionally involving dramas ever made.

Tokyo Story moves quite slowly by our Western standards, and requires more patience at first than some moviegoers may be willing to supply. Its effect is cumulative, however; the pace comes to seem perfectly suited to the material.

[Hara's] sad dignity and emotional generosity are compelling.

Yasujiro Ozu's portrait of familial relations, first seen in 1953, is marked by an indefinable melancholy that settles on the frame as softly as snow.

Even on the basis of a limited exposure to his work, the story seems archetypal Ozu.

In this exquisite merging of specific and universal, infinite and infinitesimal, Tokyo Story perhaps most clearly illuminates that Ozu is not the most Japanese of filmmakers, but the most human.

Above all, Hara's smile and Ryu's sigh are a touching show of good faith and the genuine pleasure they take in each other's company–which, of course, makes their response to life's disappointments all the more poignant.

Tokyo Story, Ozu’s 1953 magnum opus, has frequently been acclaimed by filmmakers and critics alike as the greatest film ever made, and it very arguably could be. Regardless of where you’d place it on the hierarchy of the “best ever’s", Tokyo Story is certainly the ultimate family film—that is, the ultimate film about family and what family actually means.

The movie...remains perhaps the wisest of family dramas, an experience as wrenching as it is restorative.

This 1953 classic is one of the cinema's most profound and moving studies of married love, ageing and the relations between parents and children. It is flawless and rewards numerous viewings.