Nobody does ghost stories like the Japanese. Just ask someone who has seen the contemporary Japanese movies, Ringu and Kairo. Ugetsu isn’t just a ghost story, though it’s the images from the ghost portion of the film that tend to linger in the mind and haunt the viewer for years to come.

Ugetsu is generally acknowledged to be director Kenji Mizoguchi’s finest film. Tastes in movies can be subjective, but it’s fairly obvious to anyone who has seen it that Ugetsu belongs in the same league as Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Ozu’s Tokyo Story. Set in a period of violent civil strife, a humble potter leaves his wife and young child to sell his wares in the city. He meets a mysterious woman there, who turns out to be much more than meets the eye.

One of the most beautifully photographed and fluid of the classic Japanese films, Ugetsu is given a first-class treatment by Criterion with a new high-definition digital transfer. The scenes on the water glimmer and sparkle as they did in the 35mm print, and the subtle lighting throughout is far more apparent than in the previous laserdisc release. As someone who treasured his laserdisc version of this film, I was very happy with the Criterion DVD transfer.

Eureka Entertainment offers a Blu-ray that is supposed to be very close to the theatrical experience, however that disc is Region B encoded. No word yet from Criterion on whether they plan to offer a Region A version for the U.S. market.

Criterion’s double-disc DVD set includes an informative 150-minute documentary on Mizoguchi and his films, titled Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director. It’s an excellent introduction to an under-appreciated director, who Jean-Luc Godard proclaimed as “quite simply one of the greatest of filmmakers.”

Ugetsu
(1953; directed by Kenji Mizoguchi)
The Criterion Collection (Blu-ray and DVD)

Monday, October 30 at 4:15 a.m. eastern (late Sun. night) on Turner Classic Movies

No current horror movie would be quite the same if Alfred Hitchcock hadn’t chosen to scare the living daylights out of us in Psycho (1960). It isn’t just a movie that rises above its genre. Psycho has become a model for any type of film that attempts to creatively disorient the viewer. Similarly, Bernard Herrmann’s musical score is copied — almost note for note — by young composers hoping to set the right mood for a variety of genres, including horror, action, adventure, and science fiction.

This film is so well known you probably have seen it by now. If you haven’t watched it, please do. No director knows more about manipulating the audience than Hitchcock (and that’s meant as a compliment). This is his second best film, after Vertigo (1958). If you haven’t seen Psycho, don’t read the next paragraph or the block-quotes below that paragraph, for I’ll need to touch on a key plot element.

What would be Psycho’s most important innovation? You’re not allowed to identify with any of the characters for very long. Hitchcock explained this strategy in a 1962 interview with Françoise Truffaut:

You know that the public always likes to be one jump ahead of the story; they like to feel they know what’s coming next. So you deliberately play upon this fact to control their thoughts. . . You turn the viewer in one direction and then in another; you keep him as far as possible from what’s actually going to happen. . . I purposely killed the star so as to make the killing even more unexpected. As a matter of fact, that’s why I insisted that the audiences be kept out of the theaters once the picture had started, because the late-comers would have been waiting to see Janet Leigh after she had disappeared from the screen action.

While it has been widely available on DVD since the 1990s, an anamorphic widescreen version didn’t turn up on DVD until 2005. That format provides a higher resolution for compatible televisions. The anamorphic widescreen print is included in the current DVD and Blu-ray versions.

Psycho
(1960; directed by Alfred Hitchcock)
Universal Studios (Blu-ray and DVD)

Friday, October 27 at 8:00 p.m. eastern on Turner Classic Movies