Late Autumn (1960) - Yasujiro Ozu

After years of being out of print, Ozu's Late Autumn finally gets a DVD release courtesy of Eclipse. The film takes a familiar structure of a young daughter's marriage being delayed by loyalty to her widowed parent. In this case the widowed parent happens to be the mother, and that mother is played by Setsuko Hara, who once inhabited the daughter role in a nearly identical film a decade earlier. Somewhat somber, but still enfused with a light Ozu touch, the film is as familiar as watching family videos. The formula doesn't get much reworking here, but still an enjoyable picture, that makes more than a few comparisons to the old and young generation. For once Ozu is starting to call out that maybe today's kids aren't that different from their parents generation, they just think they are.