Japanese Cinema

there's a major Ozu season at the BFI / NFT this month.. it doesn't look like they're showing his best-known film Tokyo Story, probably cos they show it quite often anyway, but out of those playing Late Spring, Tokyo Twilight, Floating Weeds and The End of Summer are well worth it. Ozu is mostly about serenity, social observation and the family, beautiful films.

Kurosawa-wise there are epics, period films and contemporary dramas and thrillers. The contemporary stuff never seems to get mentioned when people talk about him on here so I strongly recommend "High and Low", which is a tense cop thriller, and "The Bad Sleep Well", which is sort of a corporate gangster thriller. Along the way you also get film technique that you just don't see it in films of that period and you realise just how much he shaped the language of modern cinema.

"Ran" is one of the most awesome films ever made and you should try and see it on a cinema screen.

I also think "Dolls" by Takeshi and "My Neighbour Totoro" deserve a mention along with the other good modern films suggested on the thread.

they'd been showing tokyo story numerous times over the past month which might be why there's no signs of it as part of the Ozu season.

+1 on Totoro... actually, i really like most if not all of the Studio Ghibli films, especially the cat returns and porco rosso.