Critics reviews

TOKYO-GA is interesting enough as a travelogue, but it's also one of the finest examples of a filmmaker using the medium to honor the work of another.

Compared with Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1982), another outsider's take on Japan, this feels lightweight, but it contains some hypnotic passages and Wenders's narration provides plenty to chew on.

The picture meditates not so much on Ozu the filmmaker than on Ozu the vanishing feeling, motifs and images reconsidered in a modernized Japan circa 1983.

Though Mr. Wenders's images are as eloquent as anything he says, and though their simplicity and purity do justice to Ozu, I'm not sure that he isn't oversimplifying a vastly complex society and the social changes that continue to take place in it.