Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1953 “Ugetsu,” a mystical tale of love, art and war set in 16th Century Japan, may be the most beautiful of all the world’s black-and-white films. Frame by frame, shot by shot, it ...

Tale of two men in seething 16th-century Japan has a color and panorama which makes this absorbing film fare. The trials of the two men, one a potter (Masayuki Mori) who gets involved with a phantom ...

An extraordinary, characteristic crane shot in Mizoguchi’s exquisite, classic ghostfable Ugetsu Monogatari starts with the camera high up, looking over the bustling streets of a 16th-century Japanese ...

JAPANESE director Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956) was famous for his sublime, stately pictorial style -- and even more for his compassion for women caught in often cruel circumstances, reflecting their ...

At once monumental and light as mist, Kenji Mizoguchi’s ravishing ghost fantasia Ugetsu (released in 1953 and set in 16th-century Japan) finds its peasant potters fleeing the circumstances of their ...

We don't know how he began - his first three dozen or so films are lost to history - but we know how he ended: as one of Japan's greatest directors, in that elite circle that counts Akira Kurosawa and ...

The program notes for the cinematheque’s Kenji Mizoguchi series are littered with quotes comparing the Japanese director to Bach and Shakespeare, and putting him on the short list of the greatest ...

Kenji Mizoguchi took a quite a few chances in making this 1953 film, a classy ghost story centering on families besieged by civil war and knocked around by forces they cannot control. Drawn from works ...