Mike A.’s review published on Letterboxd:
Tonight's screening marked my return to The Cinematheque in my hometown of Vancouver, after an absence of... well, too damn long. It was a wonderful experience, and I'm glad the theatre marked its emergence from the pandemic miasma with this and two other firmly canonized works.
I don't know how much I can add to what others have written about Tokyo Story; it's the most acclaimed film by one of the most acclaimed directors in cinema history, and, whether or not you think it deserves to crack the Sight and Sound poll's top 10 every decade, you can surely see why it does--even if you happen to believe it's overrated.
In fact, what I'm most moved to write about now are not Ozu's immaculate frames, or the lightly pressurized stasis that brings them to life, or the serene sadness of his story... In short, not the film itself, but the very fact of its top-tier canonization, which I'm not only down with, but grateful for, because I think we need canons, I think we need hierarchy, and I think we need some--but not too many--consensus favourites.
The digital revolution has brought some powerfully disruptive changes to both cinema and cinephilia. People are unearthing, restoring, distributing and writing about so many different films from the medium's short history, and the potential for revision keeps growing; to me, that in itself helps make the case for firm, durable and resistant canonization. If that sounds reactionary, well, I don't care. I don't believe in radical ephemerality--of availability, of status, of taste--and I think the digitization of film and film culture is bringing us dangerously close to it. In the face of that danger, I'm glad we have all-but-official classics like Tokyo Story as a bulwark--and hey, if the movie gets a little more exposure than it might deserve on the merits, I can easily live with that. It's a small price to pay for a sense of enduring value in a world where so many great things are disappearing.