Had a glorious second viewing of Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu on DVD; the first happened several years ago in college, with the first Eiga Sai series at the UP Film Center.
Anyone who champions the Akira Kurosawa filmography must see this, to wash their pallete from the sheer amounts of testosterone in almost all things Kurosawa did. Mizoguchi made films with women as the key characters, and based on Ugetsu, he does this unspeakably well.
Plotwise, I don’t remember seeing anything that seamlessly fused realism and fantasy at this genius-level. This elegantly points out why CGI -or even color!- doesn’t make a fantasy-oriented film more potent than anything else in the genre.
Read Noel Vera’s review of this 1953 Japanse opus here.