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Ozu is the Japanese director most often recommended without any practical information attached. You are told that Tokyo Story is one of the greatest films ever made, that the camera sits at the height of someone kneeling on a tatami mat, that nothing much happens. Then you go looking for the films and give up somewhere between a Criterion box set and a rental page.
So this list is organised around the part nobody covers. Ten films in the order he made them, what each one is actually doing, and the US streaming status checked on the day of writing. The short version is that nine of these ten are sitting on one subscription, which is not something I expected to be able to write about a director who died in 1963.
The 10 Picks at a Glance
| Title | Format | Length | MBTI | What this one is about |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Late Spring | Live-action film | 108 min | ISFJ | A father lies so his daughter will leave him |
| Early Summer | Live-action film | 125 min | ENFP | The one where she picks the wrong man on purpose |
| Tokyo Story | Live-action film | 137 min | INFJ | An elderly couple visit their children in Tokyo |
| Early Spring | Live-action film | 145 min | ISTJ | The office worker one, his longest film |
| Tokyo Twilight | Live-action film | 141 min | INTP | The dark one, his last in monochrome |
| Equinox Flower | Live-action film | 118 min | ESTJ | A father caught out by his own advice |
| Good Morning | Live-action film | 94 min | ISFP | Two boys stop speaking until they get a television |
| Floating Weeds | Live-action film | 115 min | ESFP | A touring actor returns to the son who thinks he is an uncle |
| The End of Summer | Live-action film | 103 min | ENTP | An old man sneaks off to see a former mistress |
| An Autumn Afternoon | Live-action film | 113 min | INFP | His last film, about a father running out of reasons |
Every row links to its full entry. Nine of the ten are included with an HBO Max subscription right now, which makes this the cheapest way to watch most of a great filmography in one go.
1. Late Spring
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live-action film | Drama | 108 min | Aching, Tender |
Noriko is twenty-seven, unmarried, and perfectly happy keeping house for her widowed father in Kamakura. Everyone around them has decided this cannot continue. Her aunt produces a suitable man. Her father, who does not want her to go either, works out the only argument that will move her.
It is the first of the three films Setsuko Hara made for Ozu as a character called Noriko, made in 1949 while Japan was still under Allied occupation. Chishu Ryu plays the father, as he would in most of what follows.
The Lie at the Centre
The thing the father does in the last act is a small, deliberate cruelty performed out of love, and the film never once tells you how to feel about it. Ozu simply lets it sit there. I have watched this film four times across fifteen years and my opinion of that decision has changed every single time, which is not something I can say about many films.
There is also a scene at a Noh performance where nothing is said, the camera holds on two faces in an audience, and an entire relationship reorganises itself. If you want one example of what people mean when they call Ozu a great director, it is ninety seconds long and there is no dialogue in it.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Streaming |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Also on the Criterion Channel, on Fandor, and free with ads on Plex.
2. Early Summer
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live-action film | Drama, Comedy | 125 min | Warm, Bittersweet |
Another Noriko, no relation to the last one, living with three generations of her family in a house outside Tokyo. Her boss offers a match with a wealthy man in his forties. Everyone approves. She then announces a decision nobody saw coming, and the household has to absorb it in a single afternoon.
Made in 1951, between Late Spring and Tokyo Story, with the largest ensemble of the three. The camera spends as much time on the grandparents, the sister-in-law, the two small boys, as it does on Noriko.
Why This Is the Warmest of the Three
Late Spring is about a daughter being given away. Tokyo Story is about parents being quietly set aside. Early Summer sits between them and is the only one where somebody gets to choose, which makes it the film in the trilogy that people come back to when they want company rather than devastation.
Watch what the film does with food. There is a cake the children are promised, a lunch the women eat while gossiping, a meal at the end where the family has already begun to scatter. Japanese domestic life is organised around who eats with whom, and Ozu uses that as the load-bearing structure here instead of dialogue.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Add-on |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
This is the exception in the list. On September 25, 2026 it was listed on the Criterion Channel and through the HBO Max add-on channel sold inside Prime Video, but not in HBO Max's own catalogue, which both TMDB and JustWatch agreed on. If you are working through the Noriko trilogy on HBO Max, this is the gap you will hit.
3. Tokyo Story
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live-action film | Drama | 137 min | Devastating, Quiet |
A retired couple travel from a small town on the Inland Sea to see their grown children in Tokyo. The son is a busy local doctor. The daughter runs a hair salon. Neither has time, so they arrange for the parents to be sent to a spa, which is how people in every country decline to do something without saying so.
The only one who makes room for them is Noriko, the widow of a son who died in the war. Released in 1953, and voted the greatest film ever made by directors in the Sight and Sound poll of 2012.
It Is Not About Bad Children
Here is where I have to be honest about my first viewing. At twenty I read it as a film about ungrateful adults neglecting their parents, felt suitably superior, and moved on. That reading is available and it is wrong. Nobody in this film behaves badly. They are all tired, all short of money, all doing roughly what I do when my own parents call while I am working.
What the film is actually about is that this happens to everyone and cannot be prevented by anybody being nicer. The line near the end about how children drift away from their parents when they grow up is delivered as ordinary conversation, like a remark about the weather, and it is the most frightening thing in Japanese cinema.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Streaming |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Also on the Criterion Channel, on Kanopy through many US libraries, and free with ads on Plex.
4. Early Spring
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live-action film | Drama | 145 min | Restless, Grey |
A salaryman in his early thirties commutes, drinks with colleagues, and has an affair with a woman from the typing pool who is nicknamed Goldfish. His marriage does not survive the discovery intact. His employer offers him a transfer to a provincial plant.
Made in 1956, and at 145 minutes the longest thing Ozu directed. It is the closest he came to a film about work rather than about families.
The Bleakest Office in Japanese Film
Everything about the salaryman life that Japan would spend the next seventy years complaining about is already here, fully formed, in 1956. The commute. The compulsory drinking. The colleague who has given thirty years to a company that will not remember him. The hiking club that exists so that people who are bored can be bored together.
It is not a comfortable watch and it is the least recommended Ozu for a reason. But if you have ever worked in a Japanese office, or any office where quitting is not a real option, the scene where an older employee explains what his career amounted to will follow you home.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Streaming |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Also on the Criterion Channel, and free with ads on Plex.
5. Tokyo Twilight
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live-action film | Drama | 141 min | Cold, Desolate |
Two sisters live with their father. The elder has left her husband and come home with a child. The younger is pregnant, cannot find the man responsible, and is looking for a woman running a mahjong parlour who may be connected to the family in a way nobody has told her about.
Released in 1957. It was the last film Ozu shot in black and white, and it goes to places the rest of his work stays clear of.
Ozu Without the Consolation
Everyone describes Ozu films as serene. This one is not. It is winter, the interiors are underlit, and the plot involves abortion, abandonment, and a death that the film refuses to soften. Japanese critics at the time were uncomfortable with it, and it remains the entry most first-time viewers are steered away from.
I think it is essential precisely because of that. The serenity in the other films is a choice, not a limitation, and you only see it as a choice once you have watched him decline to make it. Watch this one third or fourth, never first.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Streaming |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Also on the Criterion Channel, and free with ads on Plex.
6. Equinox Flower
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live-action film | Drama, Comedy | 118 min | Wry, Warm |
A businessman is known among his friends as the reasonable one. He tells a colleague's runaway daughter that young people should marry for love. He gives a speech at a wedding about the same thing. Then his own daughter tells him she has chosen someone, and he discovers exactly how much of his liberalism was for other people's families.
Released in 1958. It was his first film in colour, and he uses it carefully: a red kettle turns up in shot after shot, doing work no line of dialogue does.
The Funniest Portrait of a Japanese Father
The comedy here is entirely a matter of watching a man refuse to notice that he is being unreasonable while everybody around him notices. His wife knows. His younger daughter knows. A family friend from Kyoto runs an extended piece of mischief at his expense that is the closest Ozu got to a farce.
If you have a Japanese father, or worked under a Japanese manager of that generation, the recognition is almost too much. The man is not a tyrant. He is simply unable to say out loud that he has changed his mind, so the entire household has to arrange itself so that he never has to.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Streaming |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Also on the Criterion Channel, and free with ads on Plex.
7. Good Morning
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live-action film | Comedy, Family, Drama | 94 min | Warm, Playful |
Two brothers on a suburban housing estate want a television so they can watch sumo. Told no, they go on strike and stop speaking to anyone at all. The silence spreads outward until it has disrupted the neighbourhood's association dues, its gossip, and a courtship that was going nowhere anyway.
Released in 1959, a colour remake of his own 1932 silent I Was Born, But... The boys have a game involving pressing each other's foreheads to produce a fart on cue, and it runs through the whole film.
The Argument Hidden in the Fart Jokes
The children's complaint is that adult conversation is empty. Good morning, nice weather, is that so. The film agrees with them for about an hour, and the gag about the boys' bodily noises is deliberately set against all that hollow politeness, which is a joke about language that happens to be a joke about farting.
Then it turns, in the last five minutes, into something else. Two adults stand on a railway platform talking about the weather because they cannot say the other thing, and the film reveals that the empty phrases are load-bearing. This is the Ozu I would hand to anyone who thinks his films are solemn.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Streaming |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Also on the Criterion Channel, and free with ads on Plex.
8. Floating Weeds
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live-action film | Drama | 115 min | Melancholy, Sultry |
A travelling kabuki troupe arrives in a seaside town where the ageing lead actor once left a woman with a child. The boy, now grown, believes the actor is his uncle. The actor's current lover works out why he keeps visiting the same small port, and decides to do something about it.
Released in 1959 at Daiei rather than his home studio, a colour remake of his 1934 silent A Story of Floating Weeds. Kazuo Miyagawa, who shot Rashomon, was the cinematographer.
The One That Looks Different
Because Miyagawa shot it, this is the Ozu film that people who care about images single out. Heat comes off the screen. There is a famous argument conducted across a street in heavy rain, two people shouting from opposite doorways, and it is staged with a control that makes you understand why cinematographers talk about him the way they do.
It is also his most openly emotional late film, partly because a travelling theatre troupe is the one setting where his characters are allowed to shout. Watch it after two or three of the family films, when the stillness of those has become your baseline.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Streaming |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Also on the Criterion Channel, on Kanopy, and free with ads on Plex.
9. The End of Summer
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live-action film | Drama | 103 min | Rueful, Sunlit |
The head of a small family sake brewery in Kyoto keeps disappearing. His daughters, both of whom have marriage questions of their own pending, discover he has resumed a relationship from decades ago. The brewery meanwhile is quietly losing to bigger competitors.
Released in 1961, made at Toho rather than Shochiku, with a cast borrowed from elsewhere in the industry. The penultimate film he completed.
A Comedy That Turns Without Warning
For an hour this is a light film about a disgraceful old man enjoying himself while his adult children fret. He is genuinely funny, and the film is clearly on his side against the relatives who want him to behave.
Then it changes, in the space of a single scene, and the final sequence is about the fact that a family business and a family are the same thing and both of them end. I have seen this described as minor Ozu. Whoever wrote that had not got to the crows.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Streaming |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Also on the Criterion Channel, and on Kanopy through many US libraries.
10. An Autumn Afternoon
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live-action film | Drama | 113 min | Lonely, Gentle |
A widower drinks with his old school friends, who are all quietly arranging their children's lives. One of them has kept his own daughter at home too long, and she has turned into a resentful woman in her forties. Watching that, the widower begins the slow process of arranging his own daughter's marriage.
Released in 1962. Ozu died the following year, on his sixtieth birthday, and this was the last film he finished.
Late Spring Again, With the Consolation Removed
The structure is almost identical to Late Spring, made thirteen years earlier, which is either a repetition or the point depending on how you look at it. I think it is the point. The father in 1949 loses a daughter and gains an ending you can live with. The father here gets the same result and is left in a bar singing a wartime naval march to himself.
This is the film where the pattern he spent a career building finally states its terms. Nothing has happened that was not always going to happen, everybody behaved decently, and a man is alone in his kitchen. It is the correct place to finish, and I would not watch anything else the same evening.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Streaming |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Also on the Criterion Channel, and free with ads on Plex.
US Streaming Comparison at a Glance
| Title | Crunchyroll | Netflix | Hulu | Amazon Prime Video | HBO Max | Disney+ | Apple TV+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Late Spring | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Early Summer | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | △ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Tokyo Story | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Early Spring | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Tokyo Twilight | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Equinox Flower | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Good Morning | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Floating Weeds | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ |
| The End of Summer | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ |
| An Autumn Afternoon | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ |
Checked against TMDB in the US region on September 25, 2026, with Early Summer confirmed separately against JustWatch. A circle means the film is included in that service's base subscription. A triangle means it costs extra, either as a rental or as a paid add-on channel sold through that service. A cross means it is not there at all. Every one of these is also on the Criterion Channel, which is the completist option.
Ozu's opposite number, and the two are usually discussed as a pair here. I did the same thing for ten Akira Kurosawa films, which turn out to sit on much the same subscription.
Where to Start
Do not start with Tokyo Story. It is the best of them, and it is also the one that works least well as an introduction, because its effect depends on your already being fluent in how Ozu films behave. Start with Good Morning, which is ninety-four minutes of children refusing to speak, or with Equinox Flower, where a father who gives progressive advice to other people's daughters discovers his own has taken it. Both are funny. Once the rhythm feels normal, Tokyo Story will take the top of your head off.
A word about what people mean by the tatami shot. The camera sits low, roughly at the eye level of a person seated on the floor, and in the late films it almost never moves. What this does, and you feel it before you can name it, is put you in the room as a guest rather than as an observer. Nobody is showing you anything. You are sitting there while a family has a conversation it has had a hundred times before. Once you notice it, the rest of cinema starts to look slightly pushy.
Three more worth chasing once you have finished these. I Was Born, But... (1932) is the silent film Good Morning remakes, and it is on Kanopy, which is free through a lot of US public libraries. Late Autumn (1960) is Late Spring told again with the genders shifted, on the Criterion Channel. Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) is seventy-two minutes about a woman who does not want the orphan she has been landed with, and it is free with ads on Plex. Of the Shochiku catalogue, those are the ones that got away from HBO Max.
Streaming information was verified in the US region on September 25, 2026 and can change without notice. Check the service before you commit.
