Japan Society\u2019s website<\/a> for the full schedule and ticket information.<\/p>\n\t\u201cBurn\u201d (dir. Makoto Nagahisa)<\/p>\n
\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Burn_ea82a7.jpeg\")
\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: “Burn” (dir. Makoto Nagahisa)\t\t\t<\/p>\n
At the center of Shinjuku\u2019s entertainment district, displaced young people sit around, encircled by blue plastic barriers. Some are addicts, some sell themselves for money, and others are simply homeless. Locals call them \u201cT\u014dyoko kids,\u201d a portmanteau of \u201cToho\u201d and \u201cyoko\u201d \u2014 meaning \u201cbeside\u201d \u2014 because towering over this human holding pen is the Shinjuku Toho Building, a major theater owned by the Japanese film giant. These kids exist just outside of the cinema, but writer\/director Makoto Nagahisa (\u201cWe Are Little Zombies\u201d) believes that they belong within it.<\/p>\n
Nagahisa has built his career on two principal trademarks \u2014 a kaleidoscopic stylistic flair sparked by his background in commercials, and a concern for the well-being of children rivaled in contemporary Japanese cinema only by Hirokazu Kore-eda. Here, those trademarks wrap around the story of abused teenage runaway Jurie (Nana Mori), who falls in with a group of young people in Kabukicho. The place becomes an adopted home, but also a hell of its own.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Every comfort is coupled with corruption: a place to rest comes with drugs; a new friend with the introduction of paid sex. Ju-Ju finds her first companionship in disabled teen Mitsuba (Aoi Yamada, queasily echoing Ju-Ju\u2019s sister in appearance), who seeks to numb her to the emotional damage of prostitution in favor of the fast yen it can bring. Ju-Ju wants to raise a 10 million yen sum in a short span of time so that she can save her sister from the fate she herself ran from, and, all of a sudden, the film morphs into a 2020s update of Hideaki Anno and Ry\u016b Murakami\u2019s seminal \u201cLove and Pop.\u201d It\u2019s miserablism with a searingly modern soul, as Nagahisa blends the digital with the all-too-real in innovative, haunting, formally exhilarating ways. \u2014 Blake Simons<\/p>\n
\t\u201cA Pale View of Hills\u201d (dir. Kei Ishikawa)<\/p>\n
\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Pale-View-of-Hills-2.webp\")
\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: “A Pale View of Hills” (dir. Kei Ishikawa)\t\t\t<\/p>\n
The characters in Kazuo Ishiguro\u2019s novels tend to unspool when faced with their Rube Goldberg prompt to do so; the three-act structure of their memories is ripe for successful cinematic adaptation.<\/p>\n
Ishiguro\u2019s England-set \u201cThe Remains of the Day\u201d was mounted by Merchant-Ivory in 1993 to much acclaim, and his boarding school existentialist sci-fi \u201cNever Let Me Go\u201d was emotively adapted to screen by Alex Garland and Mark Romanek in 2010. A Japanese-born British writer, Ishiguro used his lesser-celebrated early novels to examine his international heritage and identity, and it\u2019s the first of these, \u201cA Pale View of Hills,\u201d that has received a lavish new adaptation from Kei Ishikawa \u2014 a Japanese film that reflects the trappings of a BBC period drama.<\/p>\n
Journalist Niki (Camilla Aiko) has returned to her family home following her sister\u2019s suicide. She\u2019s careful to talk around the topic with her mother, Etsuko (Y\u014d Yoshida), but there\u2019s another history that she\u2019s here to explore. Niki has been assigned a feature on her personal connection to Nagasaki, but she doesn\u2019t feel she has one \u2014 her parents left for England shortly before she was born. Etsuko recalls Sachiko, a friend she had when living in post-war Nagasaki, a woman whose appearance was at once striking and elusive. Ever more drawn to her in flashback, the young Etsuko finds her behavior and attitudes changing in ways that will affect the rest of her life and generations to come.<\/p>\n
Revisiting themes of identity and memory that he keenly explored in \u201cA Man\u201d and \u201cTraces of Sin,\u201d Ishikawa\u2019s \u201cA Pale View of Hills\u201d is a film of two halves, shifting \u2014 sometimes frustratingly \u2014 between past and present. The performances here are strong, with Aiko especially bringing a grounded believability to her role as a sharp but adrift university dropout getting to grips with her heritage. Co-produced by the UK\u2019s Number 9 ilms, who also had a hand in the recent Akira Kurosawa remake \u201cLiving,\u201d this is a Japanese co-production that understands what it is to exist in a British household space \u2014 tea and biscuits, cobwebs and all. \u2014Blake Simons<\/p>\n
\t\u201cRewrite\u201d (dir. Daigo Matsui)<\/p>\n
\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Rewrite_401b88.webp\")
\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: “Rewrite” (dir. Daigo Matsui)\t\t\t<\/p>\n
No one \u2014 and I mean no one \u2014 is doing time-travel movies quite like screenwriter Makoto Ueda, whose \u201cRiver\u201d and \u201cBeyond the Infinite Two Minutes\u201d have mined raw and poignant human comedy from the stuff of \u201cPrimer\u201d-level plot loops. Needless to say, Ueda was the perfect candidate to riff on Haruka H\u00f4j\u00f4\u2019s 2013 novel \u201cRewrite,\u201d a super twisty iteration on Yasutaka Tsutsui\u2019s beloved 1967 book \u201cThe Girl Who Leapt Through Time\u201d (itself famously brought to the screen by Nobuhiko Obayashi in 1983, and then used as the source material for an even more famous Mamoru Hosada anime two decades later), about a high school student forced to relive the same day over and over.<\/p>\n
Directed by Daigo Matsui, \u201cRewrite\u201d starts as a simple genre exercise. A teenage girl named Miyuki (Elaiza Ikeda) discovers that her Onomichi high school\u2019s awkward new transfer student (Kei Adachi as Yasuhiko) is actually a time-traveler from 300 years in the future; he\u2019s paying a visit to the past to ensure that Miyuki writes his favorite novel, a love story about a teenage girl who falls in love with a time-traveler from 300 years in the future. The two kids crush on each other all summer long, their idyllic young romance giving Miyuki all the material she\u2019ll need to publish their story as a celebrated work of fiction.<\/p>\n
Alas, something goes awry along the way, and when she arrives at the predestined date of her book launch some 10 years later, it turns out that another writer has beaten her to the punch. Brace for a hilarious understatement: It appears that Yasuhiko\u2019s plan may have been slightly more complicated than he let on.<\/p>\n
Constantly layering \u2014 and then relayering \u2014 its premise in wildly unexpected ways every time it folds back on itself, \u201cRewrite\u201d develops into a warm and witty brain-teaser that comes to involve every student in Miyuki\u2019s class. Complex without ever becoming needlessly convoluted (like all great time-travel stories, its paradoxes all surrender themselves to an emotional logic), \u201cRewrite\u201d spins round and round as it drafts a seemingly infinite series of truths and futures, every one of which only becomes more valid as they dislodge the film\u2019s protagonist from the center of what once seemed like her own story. The fun of Matsui\u2019s adaptation is how playfully it arrives at the idea that it may never have belonged to Miyuki in the first place, which only makes the meaning she\u2019s able to rescue from it all the more special in the end.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cSheep in the Box\u201d (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda)<\/p>\n
\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Sheep-in-the-Box.webp\")
\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: NEON\t\t\t<\/p>\n
A master sentimentalist like Hirokazu Koreeda riffing on a movie as soul-obliterating as Steven Spielberg\u2019s \u201cA.I. Artificial Intelligence\u201d sounds like a surefire recipe for the tear-jerker of the year, so I was surprised to discover that \u201cSheep in the Box\u201d is one of the most emotionally stunted dramas the \u201cMonster\u201d auteur has ever made. And yet, it\u2019s because of the film\u2019s avoidant relationship to its own emotions that I\u2019ve found myself returning to it in my mind since Cannes, searching for answers in the unresolved feelings that Kore-eda leaves behind.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To some extent, that residual uncertainty is created by design, as the original script\u2019s two major human characters \u2014 a fortysomething married couple in sunny near-future Kamakura \u2014 start to lose their place in the grieving process after they adopt an AI-powered humanoid modeled after their dead seven-year-old son. But unlike \u201cAfter Life,\u201d in which Koreeda previously explored the lingering effects of memory, or the under-seen \u201cAir Doll,\u201d in which he contemplated the potential consciousness of an inflatable sex toy, or even \u201cLike Father, Like Son,\u201d in which he detailed the complications of exchanging one child for another, \u201cSheep in the Box\u201d is less concerned with feelings than it is with our impulse to compartmentalize them. To store them somewhere else like data on an external hard drive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The result is a grief drama that only adds up in retrospect, as Koreeda\u2019s reliance on bright, bright summer sunshine and intrusively uplifting wind instruments don\u2019t feel in sync with the story they serve until we start to appreciate how that disconnect is the director\u2019s ultimate subject. \u201cSheep in the Box\u201d may not rank alongside Koreeda\u2019s best work, but it proves mottled, nuanced, and knowing in a way that underlines why his work is so valuable in the first place.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cSuzuki=Bakudan\u201d (dir. Akira Nagai)<\/p>\n
\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Suzuki.webp\")
\n\t\t\t\tImage Credit: “Suzuki=Bakudan” (dir. Akira Nagai)\t\t\t<\/p>\n
A blockbuster cross between \u201cDeath Note\u201d and \u201cSe7en,\u201d Akira Nagai\u2019s \u201cSuzuki=Bakudan\u201d begins with an unhoused middle-aged man by the name of Tagosaku Suzuki (an electric Jiro Sato, whose deranged performance channels the ghost of Michel Simon) being interrogated at a Tokyo police station after he\u2019s arrested for drunkenly punching a vending machine. The guy isn\u2019t exactly giving \u201ccriminal mastermind,\u201d but then \u2014 just as the cops are getting bored with him \u2014 he casually mentions that a series of deadly explosions are about to rock the city. He can predict them to the minute, and he\u2019s the only one who knows where the bombs have been planted.<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t long before the police realize that Suzuki is a terrorist savant who makes the Riddler seem like a low-IQ hobbyist by comparison, and that every single word he\u2019s said to them, no matter how inane it might have seemed, was a clue to solve in his sick game.<\/p>\n
Adapted from Katsuhiro Go\u2019s best-selling novel \u201cBakudan,\u201d \u201cSuzuki=Bakudan\u201d is an absolute blast \u2014 pun intended \u2014\u00a0for anyone willing to submit to its operatic silliness. The film walks a long and winding path towards explaining Suzuki\u2019s motivation for the killing spree, but the soapiness of his backstory is offset by the sheer brutality of his crimes; even when the game he\u2019s playing with the detectives grows too convoluted for its own good, the violence it wreaks upon the citizens of Tokyo is real enough to ensure that the stakes remain clear as day (you\u2019ll never look at the Yamanote subway line the same way again). Sato is having enough fun for everyone, and the bitter joy he allows Suzuki to squeeze from his revenge is more than contagious enough to go along for the ride.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The continent\u2019s largest and best-curated festival of contemporary Japanese film is back for another can\u2019t-miss year at New…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539916,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,5497,61,60,582,229428,270],"class_list":["post-539915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-festivals","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-japan","tag-japan-cuts","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}