"Is Setsuko Hara the most beautiful actress in movie history? That’s just a rhetorical question . . . the answer, of course, is yes. In Late Spring, she plays the young daughter of a widowed father who reluctantly wants to see her married. I am the man she should have married, but that’s a different story. Like many cinephiles, I was first drawn to Ozu by his serene compositions, the meditative “pillow shots” of train stations and empty rooms that served as scene transitions, and the exquisite way that his films explore the architecture of domestic and urban life. Repeated viewings reveal that underneath the director’s formal, often eccentric playfulness, there lies a fascinating undercurrent of sexual neurosis and pathology that is thinly masked by the demure self-sacrifice of the characters. In their own quiet way, Ozu’s families are deeply fascinating. And this two-disc set has an amazing bonus: Tokyo-ga, Wim Wenders’s loving and thoughtful feature-length tribute to Ozu, the actor Chishu Ryu, and Tokyo. It’s a first-person documentary and urban portrait par excellence, photographed by Ed Lachman."

"I didn’t know there were films that represented the things represented in this film. I didn’t know you could do that. People didn’t think you could do that when this film came out. I always ask myself: how macabre can we go, how graphic can we go, how dark can we go. And the commitment of these actors to the horror that they’re subjected to in this film—you can’t fake that stuff; it’s happening. This nudity is happening, this scatological stuff . . . I don’t know how much of that stuff was happening, but it’s just pure terror and pure excess. There’s also something unwittingly seductive about the beautiful, heightened elements of the film. There aren’t many films that communicate the dangers and trespasses of fascism better than this one. The terror is not in some externalized war story, it’s something that is very domestic and very tangible. You can’t forget a film like Salò, and the shock and the horror of it make such an effective medium for its serious political themes. I think it kind of shares that with Assassination Nation."