?Of Tokyo Story, Roger Ebert wrote: “It ennobles the cinema. It says, yes, a movie can help us make small steps against our imperfections.” Jeffrey Overstreet observed: “These characters never surprise us with anything showy, lurid, or sensational. They’re ordinary human beings, treated with fierce attention that feels like deep respect.” Philip Frenchcalled it “one of the cinema’s most profound and moving studies of married love, aging and the relations between parents and children.” This is high praise for a Japanese film that the average moviegoer may not have heard of, by a director who isn’t a household name. Why does Tokyo Storywin such accolades in movie-buff circles? Let’s take off our shoes by the door and investigate. The praise: Every 10 years, the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine surveys a large, international group of critics and film experts to compile a list of the greatest films of all time. Tokyo Story appeared on the two most recent lists, at No. 3 in 1992 and No. 5 in 2002. The movie is also included on Time magazine and Empire magazine’s lists of the best films of the 20th century. The context: Now considered one of Japan’s greatest directors, Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) wasn’t well-known outside his homeland until after his death. His most acclaimed film, Tokyo Story, was made in 1953 but didn’t play in the U.S. until 1972, and it was another 20 years before it climbed onto Sight & Sound’s once-a-decade survey. Which is to say, the story behind Tokyo Story‘s notoriety is as slow-moving as the story in Tokyo Story. Ozu started making films during the silent era, cranking out a couple dozen of them, mostly shorts, between 1927 and 1932 alone. His work in the 1930s started to move away from comedy and toward drama and social criticism, and though he wasn’t a major box-office draw, he was admired by Japanese critics. His career was interrupted by stints in the military during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II, and it was after these experiences that he produced his most significant films. Pretty much everything you’ll ever read about Ozu pertains to one of the 13 movies he made between 1949 and his death in 1962. They deal primarily with ordinary human experiences like family, marriage, and death, though Ozu himself never married or had children. Tokyo Story was conceived and produced in the same workmanlike manner as most of Ozu’s movies. He and collaborator Kogo Noda (who co-wrote half of all the films Ozu ever made) spent about 14 weeks drinking sake and writing the screenplay. This was followed by a few weeks of scouting locations, then four months of shooting and editing. Ozu used a lot of the same cast and crew from one film to the next, which helped things run smoothly. There was nothing about the project to suggest that it would come