Family Without a Dinner Table

#4 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi’s films.

I really had no idea what I was getting into with Masaki Kobayashi’s final film. Extremely difficult to track down at all, I had to settle with a copy at Rarefilmm that seems to have been filmed on a VHS recorder from a television broadcast. The quality of both image and sound is…less than ideal. And yet, and yet, I got completely caught up in this tale of the complete disintegration of a family after the eldest son partakes in a very public a...