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The Roses (2025)
The Roses is evidently far more a showcase for Tony McNamara’s crackling writing than its bland visual direction, yet this darkly funny autopsy of a dysfunctional marriage wields wit and cruelty with surgical precision, exposing the combustible tensions that drive vengeful lovers to self-sabotage.
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The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952)
Although Taeko and Mokichi’s marriage has been left to wither in The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice, Yasujirō Ozu never stops yearning for the love that lingers beneath their contempt and sorrow, seeking a return to steady companionship through routine, redemption, and grace.
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Early Summer (1951)
Post-war Japan’s shifting cultural attitudes tangibly manifest within the cluttered, multi-generational household of Early Summer, its domestic interiors of birdcages and shoji doors infused with Yasujirō Ozu’s introspective meditations, and simmering tension around its eldest daughter’s longing for independence.
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Bring Her Back (2025)
As Bring Her Back draws a pair of stepsiblings into an abusive foster home, Danny and Michael Philippou unravel a conspiracy of ritual occultism and necromancy, probing the demonic depths a grieving mother will pursue to mend her broken heart.
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Late Spring (1949)
With Yasujirō Ozu’s contemplative editing and curated mise-en-scène guiding Late Spring’s lyrical rhythms forward, there is both profound joy and sadness to be found in its central father-daughter love, finding melancholy drama in her resistance to getting marriage and his quiet acceptance of being left behind.
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Caught Stealing (2025)
Loyalties flicker with slippery inconsistency in the grimy urban decay of Caught Stealing, as Darren Aronofsky drags one New York bartender into the city’s violent underbelly, and masks familiar genre tropes beneath a tone that is equal parts sardonic, kinetic, and unapologetically chaotic.
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A Hen in the Wind (1948)
Yasujirō Ozu offers nothing but sympathy for one helpless mother’s agonising moral compromise in A Hen in the Wind, imposing the harsh, destitute architecture of postwar Japan upon her shame, as well as her desperate attempt to seek marital reconciliation.
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Eddington (2025)
What initially begins as a portrait of masculine rivalry in Eddington gradually reveals a study in reactionary control, capturing a microcosm of America’s tumultuous political landscape in one rural town, and cynically submitting to Ari Aster’s combustible, existential chaos.
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Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947)
While Japan emerges from the darkness of war in Record of a Tenement Gentleman, so too does one middle-aged widow discover an unexpected compassion in her hardened heart, as Yasujirō Ozu sets in motion a spiritual transformation with the arrival of a lost child on her doorstep.
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Weapons (2025)
After seventeen children from a single class mysteriously vanish in the dead of night, Weapons charts the fragmented, overlapping perspectives of the devastated community left behind, revealing its grief as a sprawling curse that Zach Cregger renders with sinister precision.
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There Was a Father (1942)
Chaos is simply not part of Yasujirō Ozu’s meditative cinematic language, and There Was a Father especially asserts his proclivity for ritualistic repetition in smoothing over emotional disruptions, recognising the remarkable legacy of one former teacher whose soul is deeply etched with tragedy, grief, and guilt.
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Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941)
When the patriarch of one affluent family is lost in Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, there is little left to hold its fragmented remains together, and Yasujirō Ozu exacts a cutting critique of those intimate bonds weakened by class privilege.
