20 Most Personally Beautiful Japanese Films

No country has more respect from me than Japan, even though the US (perhaps necessarily) is the most influential nation in my movie-mind. I can’t speak with authority about the Japanese character or condition enough to properly explain why their cinema is the best, overall, of any national cinema I’ve taken in, but here are the ones which consistently bring me overflows of emotions.

so many are left off, and this list is CLEARLY stacked towards the all-time big names – Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa and Naruse. lesser-knowns like Ichikawa, Okamoto, Imamura and especially Gosha don’t appear as much as I have no...