I’m genuinely convinced you can learn everything you want to know about acting from Hideko Takamine’s performance here. Note the way she laughs: it’s both a deflection from romantic entreaties and a polite ingratiation for the men doing the entreating, both a show of bemused surprise and a wisp of resignation that things have gone as she knew they would. It’s a laugh that annihilates itself in contradictory meanings. A reprieve from misery, a shield from abuse, a simultaneous submission…

There is “pure cinema,” and then there is the way Ozu shoots the opening scene of Tokyo Twilight, drawing his camera into what feel like contemplative confessionals as a man and bartender discuss the intricacies of oyster season, and gradually pulling back to wider shots to acknowledge an order-mimicking interloper who soon begins to resemble the other man as they’re visually patterned in a subtle choreography of matching, slumping heads. The anonymity of these rituals, with their limited lexicon of…

One of the lost insights of the classical era, I think, is that if you want to film a comedy, you need to shoot it like a tragedy, and if you want to film a tragedy, you need to film it like a comedy. So like some of Naruse’s darkest movies—The Actress and the Poet, a slapstick comedy about spousal abuse—The Approach of Autumn is coiffured in the comedy of children telegraphing their emotions, something no adult has ever done…