vincent canby in his review observed that "the difficulty with ozu is not in appreciating his films... [but] in describing an ozu work in a way that doesn't diminish it, that doesn't reduce it to an inventory of his austere techniques, and that accurately reflects the unsentimental humanism of his discipline." he called the characters played by ryu and hara "immensely affecting—gentle, loving, amused, thinking and feeling beings," and praised the filmmaker for his "profound respect for [the characters'] privacy, for the mystery of their emotions. because of this—not in spite of this—his films, of which "late spring" is one of the finest, are so moving."