One of the casualties of the streaming wars that went unremarked upon was the quiet folding up of Criterion's Eclipse series, a sub-brand of the overall collection that saw unrestored catalogue titles from significant directors released in no-frills DVD boxed sets.
It certainly seemed as though the arrival of the Criterion Channel made Eclipse releases unnecessary, unviable, or both. But as anyone reading Screen Anarchy's home media reviews probably already knows: physical media is very much alive! And so, it was a delight to see Criterion announce the resurrection of Eclipse this past November with set #47, a collection of Abbas Kiarostami's early films.
Now Eclipse release #48 is here, and it's a unique treasure, presenting the complete filmography of an underremembered Japanese auteur: Kinuyo Tanaka, only the second Japanese woman to take the reins behind the camera, and the first to have built a substantial body of work.
Tanaka began as an actress, best known for The Life of Oharu and Ugetsu for director Kenji Mizoguchi, along with work for Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse. By the end of the American occupation of Japan, Tanaka had begun aging out of lead roles for Japanese actresses, and so, turned her interests to directing.
She went on to direct six feature films, all of which are presented on Blu-ray in Kinuyo Tanaka Directs, in addition to being available on the Criterion Channel.
True to Eclipse's form, there are no special features on the boxed set, other than a jacket essay by Imogen Sara Smith, and a QR code -- ha! -- linking to a 15-minute overview by Smith on the Channel. All six films are in excellent visual and aural shape, however, and play beautifully on Blu-ray.
In Love Letter, her debut feature, Tanaka buoyantly captures postwar Tokyo, while staging an intriguing social drama within the lingering emotional effects of the military defeat and subsequent American occupation.
Reikichi (Masayuki Mori, who co-starred with Tanaka in Ugetsu) is an out-of-work veteran and an avatar for the shattered pride of Japanese men, who gave everything to a war they ended up losing. He finds a job with an old friend, whose trilingual writing skills have him composing English letters to departed American soldiers on behalf of Japanese women left behind. These women, reviled by their own community for their wartime liaisons with the enemy, are begging for comfort or cash or both. Then Reikichi's world is upended when his lost love turns up at the shop... because she needs one of his letters, too.
Love Letter is the only of Tanaka's directorial efforts to centre a man -- two, in fact; the story is supported nicely by Reikichi's relationship with his more successful brother, who works to unite Reikichi and Michiko and heal both of their lingering wounds. The script is by Keisuke Kinoshita (who would direct Tanaka in The Ballad of Narayama, five years later) and moves fluidly from social commentary to weepie melodrama.
Tanaka's next feature takes its screenplay from no less an authority than Yasujiro Ozu, who mentored Tanaka and whose script for The Moon Has Risen trades the Tokyo bustle of Love Letter for a charming family comedy set in a disused temple in Nara prefecture.
Here, spirited lead actress Mie Kitahara teams up with cinematographer Shigeyoshi Mine to create an unabashedly lovely viewing experience. It's a black-and-white marvel, and one of my favourite films in the set.
Tanaka takes stylistic cues from Ozu here, beyond just the script. She eschews a moving camera almost entirely (although when she does finally unveil a slow, delicate track-in, it's unaccountably lovely) and frames the family dramas in locked-off tableaux at waist height.
As in a lot of Ozu's other work, there's also a sense -- lovingly captured by Tanaka in empty frames and quiet glances -- of how a life's worth of time passes, in an accumulation of small milestones; along with the prevailing observation that only the older characters are aware of this, the young too distracted by the exciting possibilities of their nascent lives.
Forever a Woman, Tanaka's third film, was unprecedented in its day and remains bracing even now, as it follows an emerging poetess who is diagnosed with breast cancer just as she is beginning to find success as a writer.
Tanaka is unflinching in depicting what, then, would have been verboten in both Japanese and American films: a double mastectomy; the deterioration of a woman's body over time; and Fumiko's paradoxical emergence of sexual desire. "Please look at my scars," delivered straight down the barrel of the camera by actress Yumeji Tsukioka, is one hell of a visual flex.
But it's all too saccharine by half, at least to my taste. The baleful music, playing constantly, makes you feel every second of the film's 110-minute runtime.
The Wandering Princess is Tanaka's first film in colour, and Tanaka works with cinematographer Kimio Watanabe to make great use of it. The film boldly foregrounds pinks, cyans, and rich apricot reds, in an evolving colour strategy, as Ryuko (Machiko Kyô) relocates to Japanese-controlled Manchuria to marry a local diplomat, and her new life begins to take root.
At the height of that new life, Ryuko's toddler Eisei comes to visit her mother while she is painting, and the entire landscape beyond them is an explosion of vibrant red, the apex of a story whose colour then begins to slowly leech away as war begins, and Japan's place in mainland China dissolves.
But "witness of history" tales can be plodding without a strong central character to anchor the perspective, and Ryuko is unfortunately so anodyne and blameless that she's little better than a statue at points. Enjoying the political movements of the story also depends greatly on a better-than-average understanding of Japanese Imperial politics, so I had to do a fair bit of reading to get up to speed with The Wandering Princess' story.
Tanaka returns to slick black and white with 1961's Girls of the Night, a sharp and absorbing character study of a former sex worker, Kuniko (Chisako Hara), trying to build a life on the straight and narrow among all-sides social pressures.
What's interesting here is that Tanaka stages the drama almost like a thriller -- and Kuniko's sex worker persona, almost like a Jeckyll-and-Hyde secondary identity. Anticipating more lurid pinky violence films of the following decade with chiaroscuro lighting and shocking cuts, the story quickly becomes spine-tingling and moving in equal measure.
(As a content warning, I should also mention that there is another former sex worker who seems to exist largely as a long-form homophobic joke, even though the very existence of queer desire in a film of this era is noteworthy on its face.)
For her final film as director, Love Under the Crucifix, Tanaka takes her largest jump backwards in time -- all the way to the Tokugawa shogunate -- and drops a banger story of romantic yearning and philosophical temper.
Gin (Ineka Arima, a partner in the production company which funded the film), in love with converted Christian samurai Ukon (Tatsuya Nakadai) since childhood, is instead promised to a feckless merchant. Gin's forbidden romance with Ukon plays out in exquisite restraint, meeting over tea ceremonies and in quiet rooms, anticipating the tensions of The Age of Innocence in feudal Japan.
"[I] would gladly go to hell just to have you once," Gin admits to her beloved, as influence pedlars and feudal lords barter her body, her family, and her name, but find themselves unable to capture her soul.
Returning to colour photography, the film features ravishing uses of natural light, as in an opening sequence where the royal blues of a samurai's livery reveal the rich cobalt of the predawn sky beyond the trees. It's a visually arresting capstone to Tanaka's work, and vies with The Moon Has Risen for my favourite film in the set.
Working through Tanaka's work has been an inspiring process, especially given the sheer range of topics, themes, and styles on display in her six films. I'm delighted to have Eclipse back in the mix at the Criterion Collection, and look forward to many more.
Visit the official Criterion Collection site for more information and to place a pre-order. Eclipse Series 48 releases Tuesday, April 28, 2026.