Bfi's the Best Japanese Film of Every Year – From 1925 to Now - Page 3

This approach brings drawbacks of its own, of course. If there's generally at least one great film to be discovered in any given year, there are also vintages where the agony of selection just proves unpleasant. 1936, 1953, most years of the early 1960s, 1985 and 1997 were all especially headache-inducing, whereas 1954 has some claim to being any nation's greatest ever cinematic year. To choose between Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho Dayu – to say nothing of Mizoguchi's Chikamatsu Monogatari, Mikio Naruse's Sound of the Mountain and Late Chrysanthemums, Keisuke Kinoshita's Twenty-Four Eyes, Heinosuke Gosho's An Inn at Osaka and the first part of Hiroshi Inagaki's samurai trilogy – is a Sophie's choice made only more ludicrous in that it's one we set ourselves. This was also the mighty year that a certain atomic reptile first emerged out of Tokyo Bay, for Godzilla's sake.

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