Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps

it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream

van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Ron and Mitter, and in this episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast, today we're tying into the British Film Institute's season on Japanese cinema and new releases on DVD and the BFI player of classic films.

We're bringing you a discussion that I recorded in 2013 to mark the 60th of the release of one of the films from director Yasujero Ozu.

Once a decade, the film magazine's sight and sound carries out a poll of directors, asking the simple question, what's the greatest movie ever made?

Last year, they asked 458 directors, including Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese.

In a shock result, Citizen Kane did not come top of the poll. It was second. The winner was a film released 60 years ago, Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story.

Tokyo Story is a drama with the most domestic of settings. Elderly parents

come to visit their children in the big city and gradually realize how far the generations have

drifted apart. But it's the execution, the filming, the minimal scripting, the sense of what's said

and what's not, that has led viewers since its release in 1953 to recognise the film

as that rarest of things, a masterpiece. So why does a film set in a suburb in Japan's capital

still resonate so strongly to explore this marvellousd film? Are the actor and director Richard

Wilson, the film critic Larushka Ivanzade, and Nakashimazu, Professor of Japanese History at Birkbeck College.

Larushka, this is regularly called either the greatest or one of the greatest films in history.

Why is that?

And I think that can be quite off-putting, I think, for some viewers.

I mean, Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, called watching Ozu a Religious Experience. You know, Vin Vendez called him Cinema's Greatest Treasure. And yet when you come to the film, you think, what is going on? This is a very modest, very small film. It's a very tiny story. And I think it might be confusing for some viewers, and people have sort of seen Ozu as a stear director, you know, someone very

minimalist and practitioner. And I think again when you come to it, you're surprised and astonished

to find something that's so universal, so quiet and so unshoey. Now, call, this is something

that Western directors have clearly managed to fall in love with despite the cultural barriers

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