Sight & Sound, the influential British film monthly began publication in 1932. Since 1952 they have compiled and published a list of the ten greatest films of all time submitted by film critics, and latterly, film directors, from around the world.

Interestingly, Orson Welles’Citizen Kane, which had led the poll from 1962 through 2002, fell to second place in 2012 behind Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Just as interestingly, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, which first appeared on these lists in third place in 1992 behind Citizen Kane and The Rules of the Game, then dropped to fifth place in 2002 behind Citizen Kane; Vertigo; The Rules of the Game; and The Godfather, re-emerged to reclaim third place in 2012. Tokyo Story’s long journey out of obscurity has been a remarkable one.

Released to great acclaim in Japan in 1953, the Japanese officials who then decided such things did not see a market for the film outside its own country. They considered it “too Japanese” for world-wide audiences then embracing the more action oriented work of Kurosawa (Rashomon), Kinugasa (Gate of Hell), and Mizoguchi (Ugetsu. Ironically Ozu’s works which were largely unknown outside his native country during his lifetime are now seen as accessible as the Hollywood product they emulate.

Ozu (born 1903) had been a film buff since childhood, often skipping school to see the latest Hollywood film. He began as a cameraman in 1923, became an assistant director in 1926 and made his first film a year later. Tokyo Story, which has just been given a deluxe Blu-ray upgrade by Criterion, was his forty-sixth film as a director.

Ozu, a bachelor who lived with his mother until she died two years before his own death from cancer at 60 in 1963, made films, both comedies and dramas, about conflicts within family life, usually involving changing mores between generations. They are also highlighted by Ozu’s long, deliberate scenes and low angled camera lensing. Indeed, the uninitiated may find Ozu’s work boring, though if you’re paying attention, it’s anything but boring. His films may be simple, but they are not simplistic.

Tokyo Story is about an elderly couple with their youngest daughter still living at home, who take a train trip across country to visit the four children who have left home, three of whom have married. Two of them live in Tokyo. Although the children are happy to see their parents, they and their own children have their own lives and soon the elderly couple feels like they are intruders and leave to return home where (SPOILER ALERT) the wife has a fatal stroke on the long train ride (END SPOILER).

The film is very close in tone and feeling to Leo McCarey’s 1937 film, Make Way for Tomorrow about a an elderly New York couple in similar circumstances. Like that film, it was not as appreciated in its own time as it has since become. Tokyo Story was not released in Europe until 1964, the year after Ozu’s death. It had its first theatrical showing in the U.S. for two days in Los Angeles in 1967. It took a week-long engagement in New York in 1972 for influential critics to finally see it and bring it the attention it long deserved.

Another McCarey film, 1945’s The Bells of St. Mary’s has been given a long overdue Blu-ray upgrade by Olive Films.

Conceived as a sequel to McCarey’s 1944 Oscar winning hit, Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary’s is actually a better film, thanks in part to Dudley Nichols’ screenplay. An Oscar winner for The Informer, Nichols’ also crafted such seminal works as Bringing Up Baby and Stagecoach.

Like Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary’s blends several stories about Catholic parish life at the time wiith Bing Crosby’s reprising his Oscar winning role as the affable Father O’Malley. Unlike Going My Way, the stories have more cohesion and ring truer to life than much of the quaintness of the earlier film. The stellar cast includes Henry Travers, Joan Carroll, William Gargan, Martha Sleeper, Ruth Donnelly and Una O’Connor. The film’s biggest asset, though, is Ingrid Bergman, fresh from her own Oscar winning role in Gaslight. The actress’ performance radiates goodness from her first appearance to her last. In-between, Bergman’s Sister Benedict proves to be as no-nonsense as Crosby’s Father O’Malley is easy-going. This reversal of roles in which the man is nurturing and the woman is the strong one was a major component of another 1945 classic, Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Besides being a wonderful comedy with music, The Bells of St. Mary’s is also one of the screen’s great platonic love stories, perhaps the best one, certainly the best of its era.

There have been many films made about the Cinderella legend. One of the oddest has to be Bryan Forbes’ 1977 musical, The Slipper and the Rose, which has just been given a Blu-ray upgrade by Inception Media Group.

Told mainly from the prince’s perspective, the prince, Richard Chamberlain, has more screen chemistry with his manservant, Christopher Gable, with whom the actor co-starred in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers, than he does with his Cinderella, newcomer Gemma Craven. The film wastes the talents of Michael Hordern, Kenneth More and Margaret Lockwood in her last role as the wicked stepmother. Edith Evans, who would be dead before the film’s U.S. release, is used abominably as the loopy Dowager Queen and Annette Crosbie, then in her early 30s, seems way too young to be playing the Fairy Godmother.

The undistinguished score is by the Sherman Brothers (Mary Poppins; Chitty Chitty Bang Bang whose more appealing The Happiest Millionaire; Tom Sawyer and Bedknobs and Broomsticks have yet to see Blu-ray releases.

One of the all-time great musicals making its way to Blu-ray in a sumptuous new release is the 1068 Oscar winner, Oliver!. Unfortunately the Twilight Time release is limited to 3,000 copies. When they’re gone, they’re gone and cannot be reissued for at least three years. The transfer is a huge improvement over previous DVD releases including the Region B British Blu-ray.

This week’s new DVD releases include Breaking Bad: The Final Season and Murdoch Mysteries: Season Six.