The best Teruko Nagaoka’s comedy movies

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.

Later in his career, Ozu started becoming increasingly sympathetic with the younger generation, a shift that was cemented in Equinox Flower, his gorgeously detailed first color film, about an old-fashioned father and his newfangled daughter.

A husband and wife's pet peeves and minor irritations escalate into major rifts and animosity.

Shokichi, a shop owner and middle-aged widower, could never forget your first love. The second floor of the shop is an art gallery where his avant-garde daughter and other young people gather. One of these becomes a successful painter, and one day Akiko appears in the gallery with the painting titled Woman. Shokichi surprised to find that the "woman" is actually his first love, and Akiko is like the image writing it.