The final film of director Kenji Mizoguchi follows the lives of five prostitutes in the Yoshiwara region of Tokyo. Each has a different story and different plans, but they all share an uncertain future as they face the outlawing of their profession.

Dr. Sanada is an alcoholic, in part due to the despair that constantly assails him as he tries to keep the inhabitants of a post-World War II Tokyo slum as healthy as possible. Food and medical supplies are scarce, the neighborhood is around an open sewer, and the only place to buy medicines is the black market-- controlled by the Yakuza. Matsunaga, a young yakuza with a violent temper, seeks Sanada's help to remove a bullet from his hand, but Matsunaga's...

One of the ineffably lovely domestic sagas made by Yasujiro Ozu at the height of his mastery, it is a subtly piercing portrait of a marriage coming quietly undone. Secrets and deceptions strain the already tenuous relationship of a childless, middle-aged couple, as the wife's city-bred sophistication bumps up against the husband's small-town simplicity, and a generational sea change, in the form of their headstrong, modern niece, sweeps over their...