Japan Cuts 2026’s Five Best Movies to See

“Burn” (dir. Makoto Nagahisa)

Image Credit: “Burn” (dir. Makoto Nagahisa)

At the center of Shinjuku’s 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 “Tōyoko kids,” a portmanteau of “Toho” and “yoko” — meaning “beside” — 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 (“We Are Little Zombies”) believes that they belong within it.

Nagahisa has built his career on two principal trademarks — 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. 

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’s 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 Ryū Murakami’s seminal “Love and Pop.” It’s miserablism with a searingly modern soul, as Nagahisa blends the digital with the all-too-real in innovative, haunting, formally exhilarating ways. — Blake Simons

“A Pale View of Hills” (dir. Kei Ishikawa)

Image Credit: “A Pale View of Hills” (dir. Kei Ishikawa)

The characters in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 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.

Ishiguro’s England-set “The Remains of the Day” was mounted by Merchant-Ivory in 1993 to much acclaim, and his boarding school existentialist sci-fi “Never Let Me Go” 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’s the first of these, “A Pale View of Hills,” that has received a lavish new adaptation from Kei Ishikawa — a Japanese film that reflects the trappings of a BBC period drama.

Journalist Niki (Camilla Aiko) has returned to her family home following her sister’s suicide. She’s careful to talk around the topic with her mother, Etsuko (Yō Yoshida), but there’s another history that she’s here to explore. Niki has been assigned a feature on her personal connection to Nagasaki, but she doesn’t feel she has one — 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.

Revisiting themes of identity and memory that he keenly explored in “A Man” and “Traces of Sin,” Ishikawa’s “A Pale View of Hills” is a film of two halves, shifting — sometimes frustratingly — 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’s Number 9 ilms, who also had a hand in the recent Akira Kurosawa remake “Living,” this is a Japanese co-production that understands what it is to exist in a British household space — tea and biscuits, cobwebs and all. —Blake Simons

“Rewrite” (dir. Daigo Matsui)

Image Credit: “Rewrite” (dir. Daigo Matsui)

No one — and I mean no one — is doing time-travel movies quite like screenwriter Makoto Ueda, whose “River” and “Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes” have mined raw and poignant human comedy from the stuff of “Primer”-level plot loops. Needless to say, Ueda was the perfect candidate to riff on Haruka Hôjô’s 2013 novel “Rewrite,” a super twisty iteration on Yasutaka Tsutsui’s beloved 1967 book “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” (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.

Directed by Daigo Matsui, “Rewrite” starts as a simple genre exercise. A teenage girl named Miyuki (Elaiza Ikeda) discovers that her Onomichi high school’s awkward new transfer student (Kei Adachi as Yasuhiko) is actually a time-traveler from 300 years in the future; he’s 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’ll need to publish their story as a celebrated work of fiction.

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’s plan may have been slightly more complicated than he let on.

Constantly layering — and then relayering — its premise in wildly unexpected ways every time it folds back on itself, “Rewrite” develops into a warm and witty brain-teaser that comes to involve every student in Miyuki’s class. Complex without ever becoming needlessly convoluted (like all great time-travel stories, its paradoxes all surrender themselves to an emotional logic), “Rewrite” 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’s protagonist from the center of what once seemed like her own story. The fun of Matsui’s 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’s able to rescue from it all the more special in the end.

“Sheep in the Box” (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda)

Image Credit: NEON

A master sentimentalist like Hirokazu Koreeda riffing on a movie as soul-obliterating as Steven Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” sounds like a surefire recipe for the tear-jerker of the year, so I was surprised to discover that “Sheep in the Box” is one of the most emotionally stunted dramas the “Monster” auteur has ever made. And yet, it’s because of the film’s avoidant relationship to its own emotions that I’ve found myself returning to it in my mind since Cannes, searching for answers in the unresolved feelings that Kore-eda leaves behind. 

To some extent, that residual uncertainty is created by design, as the original script’s two major human characters — a fortysomething married couple in sunny near-future Kamakura — 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 “After Life,” in which Koreeda previously explored the lingering effects of memory, or the under-seen “Air Doll,” in which he contemplated the potential consciousness of an inflatable sex toy, or even “Like Father, Like Son,” in which he detailed the complications of exchanging one child for another, “Sheep in the Box” 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. 

The result is a grief drama that only adds up in retrospect, as Koreeda’s reliance on bright, bright summer sunshine and intrusively uplifting wind instruments don’t feel in sync with the story they serve until we start to appreciate how that disconnect is the director’s ultimate subject. “Sheep in the Box” may not rank alongside Koreeda’s best work, but it proves mottled, nuanced, and knowing in a way that underlines why his work is so valuable in the first place.

“Suzuki=Bakudan” (dir. Akira Nagai)

Image Credit: “Suzuki=Bakudan” (dir. Akira Nagai)

A blockbuster cross between “Death Note” and “Se7en,” Akira Nagai’s “Suzuki=Bakudan” 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’s arrested for drunkenly punching a vending machine. The guy isn’t exactly giving “criminal mastermind,” but then — just as the cops are getting bored with him — he casually mentions that a series of deadly explosions are about to rock the city. He can predict them to the minute, and he’s the only one who knows where the bombs have been planted.

It isn’t 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’s said to them, no matter how inane it might have seemed, was a clue to solve in his sick game.

Adapted from Katsuhiro Go’s best-selling novel “Bakudan,” “Suzuki=Bakudan” is an absolute blast — pun intended — for anyone willing to submit to its operatic silliness. The film walks a long and winding path towards explaining Suzuki’s 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’s 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’ll 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.