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Poster for Good Morning

Good Morning

Important things are hard to say.

1959 · 1h 34m · Not Rated Comedy, Drama, Family
Directed by Yasujirō Ozu

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Overview

A lighthearted take on director Yasujiro Ozu’s perennial theme of the challenges of inter­generational relationships, Good Morning tells the story of two young boys who stop speaking in protest after their parents refuse to buy a television set. Ozu weaves a wealth of subtle gags through a family portrait as rich as those of his dramatic films, mocking the foibles of the adult world through the eyes of his child protagonists. Shot in stunning color and set in a suburb of Tokyo where housewives gossip about the neighbors’ new washing machine and unemployed husbands look for work as door-to-door salesmen, this charming comedy refashions Ozu’s own silent classic I Was Born, But . . . to gently satirize consumerism in postwar Japan.

Director and cast

Critics on Rotten Tomatoes

Top critics, in their words

All reviews
94%
Tomatometer
Fresh

[Ozu's] sense of generational conflict in a society at risk from within is here at its sharpest and most anarchic.

Richard Brody, New Yorker
Fresh

Perhaps the most delightful of Yasujiro Ozu's late comedies.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Fresh

A brimming sense of life, in other words, gradually transforms the small talk into a richly devious portrait of humanity being human.

Tom Milne, Time Out
Rotten

Cozy but tepid.

New York Times

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