Tokyo Story: Combi Pack (Blu-ray & DVD) (2 Discs) (Blu-ray)

It's an age-old story: elderly parents travel to see their grown children who are all so wrapped up in their own lives they fail to see how their father and mother are coming to the end of their existence. The difference here is that it is told in painstaking, fastidious detail by one of cinema's great observationists. Director Yasujiro Ozu uses a static camera throughout to focus intently on what is being said and - probably more importantly - not being said between the elderly couple and their quite frankly appallingly selfish children. It also offers us a fascinating insight into how tradition and modernism were co-existing in post-war Japan. Very slow-going, probably too dramaticallly inert for many viewers, this nevertheless exerts a quiet power and fascination.