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Plenty of film fans have one project in particular that they associate with their love for the medium. Perhaps the most famous film critic to ever live, Roger Ebert is no different. At the end of every year, Ebert would famously select his favorite films and compile them into respective rankings. However, he is also remembered for presenting fans with a list of his ten favorite films ever made. And among those is The Third Man (1958).

Ebert cited Citizen Kane (1941) by Orson Welles as the most important film ever made, and called La Dolce Vita (1960) by Federico Fellini his "real" favorite film. Both make his top ten list of all-time favorite films, with the rest being of similar caliber and popularity. Like many other famous figures in the film business, Ebert compiled a ranking of ten essential films that he subjectively deemed the best.

The Films That Influenced Ebert

Of course,...

Dir: Kogonada. Starring: Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Justin H Min, Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja, Haley Lu Richardson. PG, 96 minutes.

After Yang finds no fear in the future – only existential malaise. Set in a vague not-so-distant time, the film follows Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Jake (Colin Farrell) as they grapple with a broken robot. They had bought Yang, a refurbished android embodied by Justin H Min, to help familiarise their adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) with her native Chinese culture. But Yang has since stopped working. The android sits hazy in the background of the film, slumped against a wall. A corpse that’s not a corpse.

And so, Jake attempts to have Yang fixed, an endeavour that leads to the discovery of a chip implanted in the robot’s body. It isn’t spyware, as he initially suspected, but a rare, experimental memory bank that has archived the most memorable seconds of each day.

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Two of the most anticipated Japanese films showing at the Venice Film Festival this year — Kei Ishikawa’s mystery drama A Man (2022) and a digitally remastered version of Yasujirō Ozu’s timeless classic A Hen in the Wind (1948) — share a uniquely curious distinction. The two Japanese films, separated by 74 years, were both written in the exact same room.

Ozu, one of the great masters of cinema history, famously spent long stretches of the 1940s and 1950s — his most productive period — residing and working at Chigasaki-kan, a small ryokan, or traditional Japanese inn, located on a quiet stretch of coast to the southwest of Tokyo. Ozu’s hideaway within the inn was its “niban no oheya,” or “room 2.” A modest space befitting an Ozu drama, the room was designed in Japan’s traditional washitsu style: tatami mats, a simple floor-level table and sliding shoji...

Few filmmakers have captured raw family dynamics in motion as wonderfully as Yasujiro Ozu. Throughout his career, he solidified himself as a simplistic yet superb storyteller with an appealing aesthetic style while also capturing the societal climate of Japan at the time. In the later years of his career, with the jump from black-and-white to color, Ozu primarily did reimaginings of his previous features, some straight-up remade. The most obvious example is his gem “Floating Weeds,” a remake of his earlier work “A Story of Floating Weeds.” Yet even with the reinstating of familiar elements in his later projects, he still added unique aspects to them while having said films stand on their own merits. As a perfect example, familiarity and freshness are present in his beautiful swan song “An Autumn Afternoon.”

This would be Yasujiro Ozu’s final film which would be released in late 1962. A year later, he passed away on December 12th,...

Tokyo Chorus

Directed by Yasujirô Ozu

Written by Kôgo Noda

Japan, 1931

After launching its 2013 schedule with one of the most unrelentingly somber works of art ever committed to celluloid, the Tsff took a more genial tack on the second night of its run. Revered for his celebrated series of post-World War Two family melodramas, Yasujirô Ozu actually began his career as a comedic filmmaker – and this rambunctious movie (which befited immensely from keyboardist Laura Silberberg’s jaunty live accompaniment) reflects that. As special guest speaker (and Shinsedai Cinema Festival co-programmer and co-director) Chris MaGee argued during his introductory remarks, Tokyo Chorus occupies a crucial place in Ozu’s oeuvre, announcing a “familial turn” that would eventually produce masterpieces like Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953).

The intense dramatics of those later efforts are mostly absent from Tokyo Chorus, but that does not mean that this isn’t a serious film. In fact,...

Kohayagawa-ke No Aki / The End of Summer (1961) Direction: Yasujiro Ozu Screenplay: Yasujiro Ozu, Kôgo Noda Cast: Ganjiro Nakamura, Setsuko Hara, Yôko Tsukasa, Michiyo Aratama, Chieko Naniwa, Hisaya Morishige, Reiko Dan By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica: When an artist has reached a level of such high art that he and his work can be spoken of as being in the top tier of his art form, something terrible happens: often brilliant — but not quite ineffably so — work is looked upon with a lesser eye by critics and audiences alike. This is not an unnatural development; once treated to fancy cuisine, even a good steak can seem a comedown to most palates. Yet, that is a frustrating development, for sometimes quality is overlooked or dismissed because it is merely an 8 of 10, rather than a perfect 10. Such is the case concerning the critical reception of Yasujiro Ozu’s [...]...