Modern genre critics equally reviewed the film positively, giving the film an aggregate score of 100% on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes from 24 reviews. Kurosawa biographer Stuart Galbraith IV, reviewing the Criterion Collection DVD, called the work "archetypal postwar Ozu" and "a masterful distillation of themes its director would return to again and again... There are better Ozu films, but "Late Spring" impressively boils the director's concerns down to their most basic elements." Norman Holland concludes that "Ozu has created—in the best Japanese manner—a film explicitly beautiful but rich in ambiguity and the unexpressed." Dennis Schwartz calls it "a beautiful drama," in which "there's nothing artificial, manipulative or sentimental."