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Japanese cinema authority Max Tessier wrote that The Ceremony – he, like most Oshima experts, prefers Ceremonies as a more appropriate title – “today more than ever appears to be the summation of Oshima’s work to date . . . . In this film, Oshima reveals his innermost feelings in nearly perfect form.” The Ceremony was widely hailed as the most ambitious Japanese film of its decade; it makes much contemporary cinema look puny by comparison, so dense and complex is its achievement. Cast as a family saga, the film focuses on a young boy, born in Manchuria, and his mother, who make it back home after the war to rejoin the powerful Sakadura clan. Oshima savagely chronicles the family’s fortunes and woes from 1946 to the present, as its members gather for yearly ceremonies: burials, weddings, reunions. Through magisterial use of flashbacks, Oshima reveals the Sakaduras’ dark past, its communists and militarists, war criminals and rising businessmen, sports heroes and suicidal patriarchs all involved in postwar Japan’s economic rise and societal shame. The Sakaduras’ distorted, feudal values and power struggles, hidden behind and intensified by elaborate ritual, become a form of shared madness, and Oshima employs the clan’s collapse – part Jacobean, part House of Atreus – into incest, illness, and violence as an allegory of postwar Japan’s moral wasting. The film’s exquisite formal design only magnifies the sense of slow-motion entropy.  “Brilliant and haunting  . . . a truly modern film, but with classical echoes, and it is not to be missed” (Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice). “Oshima’s masterwork” (Stephen Schiff, The Boston Phoenix). “Oshima’s most profound work” (Joan Mellen). “Oshima’s most celebrated film” (Noël Burch).