This film used to make all the top ten lists for the greatest movies ever made. However, with the discovery of Ozu and the ( justified) cinematic canonization of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi has been been neglected. This is a pity, for he was one of the supreme masters of the cinema. Ugetsu Monogatari is one of the most beautiful explorations of the human spirit ever put on the screen. Rarely has black and white been used more beautifully, or the supernatural portrayed more convincingly. If Dreyer is the great "Protestant" of the cinema, and Bresson, Rossellini, and, it must said, Hitchcock and Ford, its great "Catholics', Mizoguchi is its greatest Buddhist.
