NYAFF 2026 Preview

Funky Freaky Freaks - Han Yong-gi, Jisook and Dumbo are foul mouthed, troubled highschool friends. When not in class, they engage in various mischief - including selling dirty underwear and pretending to be a girl online. The film's rough, handheld aesthetics and with jumpcuts, mixed media formats, and urban decay settings give it an energetic, edgy feel to the trio's shenanigans. Everything changes with the arrival of Woojoo, a handsome Judo champ transfer student from a rich family. Much to the distress of Yong-gi, Jisook's childhood friend who has been carrying a flame for her, Jisook destructively falls for Woojoo, who is a known womanizer.

After Woojoo unceremoniously dumps Jisook, they devise a plan to kill him - lure him into a deserted building. But Dumbo never shows up and Woojoo gets spooked and runs away. Jisook chastises Yong-gi and drives him to kill Woojoo in school.

Funky Freaky Freaks features the social media saturated environment and its pressure to conform in the most artificial ways, where looking good means everything and deception becomes the weapon of choice for the outsiders and non-conformists. It's a stark, uncompromising debut.

Kinki - Shiraishi Kinki is a south central region of the mainland of Honshu, also known as Kansai. So despite how it sounds, it's not that kind of film. The found-footage horror master Shiraishi Koji (Noroi), directs this Lovecraftian horror that has a lot of creepy imagery and jump scares, also touching on Japanese folk horror involving torii gates, a cult group and resurrection.

It plays out as a missing persons case involving a reporter on a big mystery case. The mountains of clues in physical media- videotapes of interviews, folklore, anime, CDs and newspaper clippings and thumb drives, throw a young journalist and a friend of a missing reporter deep into the mystery, where peoples head vends back in unnatural ways, disappearing limbs, falling deaths, etc. It's a good throwback to early 2000 Japanese horror.

Human Resource - Thamrongrattanarit Fren works at the HR department of a company situated among the glass and steel towers in Bangkok's business district. She discovers she is in early stages of pregnancy, but her feelings on expecting a baby are ambivalent at best. The world is a scary place according to the news which is bombarding the airwaves every day in her commute. Her husband, Thame, is a sales person for an anti-stabbing protective gear company. Fren and her co-worker interview many young people for an entry level position in her company, vacated by a young woman who failed to show up to work for several days now. The applicants are all overqualified and demanding. But in this economy, it is hard to be choosy. The company wants someone who can work 6 days a week with low salary, under a tyrannical boss, whose bad temper goes unchecked.

The threat of the everyday world escalates in a monstrous traffic jam in Fren's neighborhood and confrontations become more frequent. Fren's stress and exhaustion results in a fenderbender and Thame finally finds out that they are expecting a baby. He is overjoyed and busies himself to provide for his family - enquiring about the elite international school, decluttering the house, etc. But for Fren, often seen in silhouette or in profile at night, something is eating at her.

With constant overhead shots of the urban jungle combined with long static shots of inanimate objects and great sound design, Human Resource shares the universal concern of treating human beings like resources, leaving humanity behind.

Montreal, My Beautiful - He Joan Chen stars in this queer drama set in Montréal. She plays Feng Xia, a dutyful housewife of Wang, an immigrant who has a convenience store business. They have two kids - daughter just started college and son is in elementary school. She is having hot flashes and irritability due to menopause. Her daughter's refusal to translate anymore in public forces Feng Xia to take up French classes, after living in Montréal for 14 years. With the encouragement of a gay Cuban classmate who finds the city liberal and open, Feng Xia joins a dating app and finds Lisa (Charlotte Aubin), a stunning 30 year old blonde, working as a server in a cafe. Feng Xia has a secret love in her youth with another girl.

Forbidden love, duty, culture clash all take part in Chinese Canadian filmmaker Xiaodan He's immigrant story. Joan Chen, at 65 is still luminous and plays Feng Xia, a woman trapped between tradition and desire, gracefully. Aubin, as a young woman still trying to figure out herself and finding love is also commendable.

Japan Cuts 2026 Preview

North America’s largest festival of contemporary Japanese film returns for its 19th year this summer at Japan Society! Take a closer look at over 30 curated films from across Japan featuring major award-winners, indie darlings, up-and-coming filmmakers, restorations, documentaries, short films, anime and more. JAPAN CUTS will present lauded actress Hirose Suzu with the CUT ABOVE Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film and host the New York Premiere of A Pale View of Hills starring Hirose as our Centerpiece Film, and the festival will conclude with legendary director Koreeda Hirokazu appearing in-person for the North American Premiere of Sheep in the Box, as the Closing Film. The festival runs July 8 through 18.

And these are the films I was able to sample:

Burn - Nagahisa With expressionistic visuals that combine lo-fi aesthetics and 3D animations, Burn tells the story about Ju-Ju, a teen runaway from a religious zealot household where she and her little sister get regular whipping from her parents. Ju-Ju joins a colorful misfits group headed by seemingly benevolent leader Kami in the famous Toyoko Square in Kabukicho, Shinjuku. She befriends Mitsuba, a girl with a limp from a childhood accident, who uses her disability to lure men in for money. Soon Ju-Ju learns the rope in prostitution from Mitsuba, in the hopes of earning enough money to save her sister from parental abuse. But she slowly learns that her new-found family is not all unicorns and rainbows. She learns that the world is a sinister and endless destructive cycle that she can't escape from. Ju-Ju has only one option - burn it all down.

Burn features perhaps the most sinister foreshadowing in the presence of a pink dildo in the first half, later used as a murder weapon. Saccharine, yet sad, Nagahisa burrows into the narcissistic and fatalistic journey of an outcast teenage girl.

A Pale View of Hills - Ishikawa *Center Piece, featuring Cut Above Award recipient Hirose Suzu Niki (Aiko Camilla), a half-Japanese journalist in England is visiting her mom (Yoshida Yoh) in the countryside. Mom is selling the house that Niki and her sister Keiko grew up in. It's the 80s and everything 'Oriental' is in vogue and she is asked to write about her family origins in Nagasaki. So starts A Pale View of Hills, an understated, complex, handsome adaptation of famed English Author Ishiguro Kazuo (Howard's End, Never Let Me Go)'s debut novel.

Mostly told in flashback, the story centers around Niki's mother Etsuko (Hirose Suzu) in Nagasaki in post-war Japan. The year is 1952. As the country quickly recovered from the atomic bomb devastation and war defeat, the trauma and guilt are deeply felt in everyone. As a young woman expecting a child, Etsuko befriends Sachiko (Nikaido Fumi), a flamboyant woman with her daughter Mariko, yearning to move to America with her GI boyfriend. Mariko, who witnessed the aftermath of the atomic bomb blast and is deeply traumatized, has severe behavioral issues. The film addresses generational conflicts, survivor's guilt, and deep seeded traumas through an unreliable narrator. As with many Ishiguro's books, the emotional revelation in A Pale View comes slowly and subtly, like ripples in a pond. Through her mother's story, Niki is able to understand her sister's suicide and women's choices in the modern world.

Hirose, donning a bobbed curly hairstyle, has a striking resemblance here to Hara Setsuko, a darling of classic Japanese cinema, who starred in countless Ozu films.

Gosh!! - Odagiri Odagiri Joe's freewheeling comedy packed with familiar faces in Japanese cinema - among them, Odagiri himself as a K-9 unit police Dog who seems to be appearing in a middle aged womanizer in a dog suit to his human partner. There's a Bollywood style song and dance number, an elite K-9 handler police woman who faints like a goat when startled, surreal tacoyaki (fried octopus ball) festival, crooked red doors in the middle of the sea that transports you to another dimension, an old white haired ‘super volunteer’ who meddles in missing persons cases, gangsters in a swinging jazz club and a little old man fairy.

Odagiri shows his penchant for slapstick physical comedy here. Playful but directionless, Gosh!! plays out like a loosely connected string of comedy skits that doesn't really land hearty laughs.

Our Little Sister - Kore-eda *Featuring Cut Above Award recipient Hirose Suzu The movie starts. The three Koda sisters gather in a mountain town for their dad's funeral. They hadn't seen him in more than 15 years. He had an affair with other women and their mother ran away long ago. It was the eldest, Sachi (Haruka Ayase)'s job to take charge of their old style home in picturesque seaside Kamakura and raise her siblings. They find out they have a wide eyed, 15 yr old little step-sister, Suzu (Suzu Hirose) who'd been taking care of their father on his deathbed. She doesn't get along with her step-mother (he was married 3 times). Sachi decides to invite Suzu to live with them. Suzu accepts the offer and they say their goodbye at the train station until their next encounter. The little girl runs after the leaving train... waving madly at the step-sisters, total strangers she just met... like a puppy dog in a shelter who just got some attention...

I break down. It's only been twenty minutes into the movie and I am sobbing like a little girl. Fucking Koreeda. He got me real good. Our Little Sister is such an old fashioned movie - a small town where everybody knows each other, sibling rivalry, life's little complications, family traditions.... But it's done in such a gentle, loving way, you can't deny its honest-to-god innate goodness in ordinary people Kore-eda's portraying. It's an achingly beautiful movie.

Rex: A Dinosaur's Story - Kadokawa Seldom seen outside Japan, this Jurassic Park meets E.T. story was a massive hit domestically, until it was pulled out of theaters amid scandal involving its director, Kadokawa Haruki and his cocaine smuggling business. It was released in 1993, just a few months after Spielberg's Jurassic Park debuted.

This Children's film tells an unlikely friendship of a baby T. Rex and a young girl named Chie (Adachi Yumi). Akira, a paleontologist father of Chie, discovers a frozen dinosaur egg inside a crystal pyramide, after following a Jomon period pictograph into an ice cave, with the help of an Ainu (indigenous people in northern Japan) in Hokkaido. Chie is reunited with her emotionally distant mother who happens to be an embryologist in New York, flies over to help in hatching the egg. She abandoned Chie over her career. Just like dinosaurs abandoning their offsprings after they are born. Chie becomes the baby dinosaur's surrogate mother after the egg hatches- wink-wink, nudge-nudge. But the sinister corporation is trying to capitalize on the discovery by putting Chie and Rex in commercials and selling merchandise, against their will. Rex is mistreated and caged like a circus animal. So it is Chie and the local munchkins to break Rex out, with snowmobiles and air balloons!

Created by the special effects legend Carlo Rambaldi (King Kong, Alien, Possession, E.T.), Rex is a wide-eyed adorable lizard-puppy, a live-action pokemon character with wagging tales, rather than a killing machine with razor sharp teeth. Jolly fun!

Family Secrets

Romería (2025) - Simón In Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón's new film, Romería, the focus is, once again, her family history, just like her debut, Summer 1993 (2017). This autobiographical film tells a story of Marina (Llucía Garcia), an 18 year old orphan, traveling to the Northwestern port city of Vigo, to reconnect with her paternal family. The year is 2004. She hopes to gain recognition as a legitimate daughter of her dead father on paper, so she can get a scholarship to study film. Navigating knotty family relations with her mother's diary as a guide, Marina learns the truth about her deceased parents and how they were treated by the family when they were alive.

Marina is greeted by her uncle Lois, his wife and three sons who live on a houseboat. She would be staying with them while visiting Vigo. Nuno (Mitch Martin), one of Lois's sons, being around the same age as Marina, becomes close. After meeting various aunts and uncles and cousins, Marina discovers many discrepancies in their stories about her parents and what she was told growing up and also her mother's diary. For instance, Lois tells her that her parents lived in an apartment in Playa Samil, a beach overlooking the isle of Cie, but her mother's diary indicates that they lived in the nearby isle of Toralla, and she finds out that her father died in 1992, not in 1987 like she was told when she was growing up.

Marina grows closer to uncle Iago (Alberto Garcia), a motorcycle riding, black sheep of the family, as he reminds of them of Marina's father. She gets a cold reception from her grandmother while her grandfather gives her an envelope full of cash for her studies. She refuses, but relents when he persists. She is disappointed to learn that her grandparents kept her sick father in the house, isolated, away from prying eyes, after he contracted AIDS and dying. Iago explains that back then, it was a taboo subject and people hid their sick family members in order to save face.

Marina sneaks out of the houseboat one night with the help of Nino and sneaks into her grandparents' house to return the cash envelope. Then Marina takes a rowboat to visit Toralla, where her parents once lived.

Now we are introduced to her parents in the 80s, played by Garcia and Martino, playing double roles, living their carefree, bohemian life on the beach. It becomes increasingly clear that they were both heroin addicts and Iago was in the scene as well, but survived but Marina's parents didn't.

Romería is a pretty film, despite its heavy subject. Shot by the great French cinematographer Hélène Louvart (La Chimera, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, The Beaches of Agnés), the film captures the sunkissed Atlantic coast of Vigo, as well as naturally lit interiors. The dream-like sequence in Toralla, where young lovers (Marina's parents) spend their carefree days is gorgeous to look at. The camera adores luminous LIucia Garcia, who is in every scene, often in her red dress with her cute bangs, walking around with her little digital camera.

But Romeria is a little too precious and picture-perfect for me to fully embrace. The film's visual beauty undercuts its serious subjects - The heroin addiction and AIDS crisis in the 80s and the society's collective shameful response to it. Romería is Simón's personal reconstruction of the incidents that ultimately robbed her childhood. But as with Summer 1993, it feels like a heavily sanitized version of recounting a family history from a doe-eyed, little goody two-shoes innocent child's point of view.

Romerîa opens in theaters June 26 in New York and July 1 in Los Angeles. National rollout to follow.

War Games

Summer War (2026) - Scherson Chilean director Alicia Scherson, adapts Roberto Bolaño's posthumous manuscript The Third Reich into Summer War, with the blessing from Lotaro Bolaño, the author's son (serving as an executive producer). This is Scherson's second adaptation of Bolaño's work, the first one being The Future, based on A Little Lumpen Novelita, about two orphans and a recluse, former beefcake played by Rutger Hauer in Chile. The Third Reich, which was written in 1989, may lack the author's signature style of labyrinthine, POV shifting later works, but is just as sharp and complex in its observations of Latin America under political strife and legacy of colonialism.

Summer War takes place in Chile in February 1989, in the waning days of Pinochet dictatorship. A pasty, bespectacled gringo named Udo Berger (Dan Beirne) is vacationing in Santiago, staying in the same hotel he once visited as a child with his parents. He is there to write an article about a popular strategy board game called The Third Reich. It's a WWII inspired wargame with hexagonal chips with complicated rules and stats. Udo belongs to an enthusiastic players group in the US and takes the game very seriously. In fact, he brought the board game with him to play by himself, much to the chagrin of his gorgeous girlfriend Ingrid (Lux Pascal). Udo narrates that things have changed in Chile and it feels much safer since his last visit - someone describes it as, "like Florida, just a little bit dirtier."

While on the beach sunbathing and swimming, Udo and Ingrid befriend a group, headed by enigmatic Charly (Augustin Padella), an Argentine with his profession and background shrouded in mystery. Udo also notices a man with a burn mark on half of his face, locally known as El Quemado (burnt man), living on the beach, making a living by providing beach chairs and surf boards to beach goers.

One night, to Ingrid's dismay, they witness Charly beating up his girlfriend. When they tell locals about calling the police, they laugh it off. "No, the police aren't going to help." A few days later, Charly disappears after taking his surfboard out to the sea. Udo suspects a foul play. We get the feeling that below the surface of sun-kissed beaches, things are not as safe as it seems. Spooked by all these dark developments, Ingrid goes back home. Udo stays behind, telling her that he will stick around until the missing Argentine is found. Instead, he finds a formidable opponent in El Quemado, in playing the Third Reich with. Udo notices that Quemado is extremely fast at catching up with the game - The Allies are winning! Udo finds out Quemado is coached by a sick old proprietor of the hotel, whose wife he is having an affair with.

On the eve of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Pinochet stepping down, Summer War examines how the past lingers on in the minds and actions of people. As the board game bleeds into real life, things get intense. The Third Reich might be a harmless strategy game, a theoretical exercise for an American, but for people who lived and experienced everyday violence under dictatorship, which was assisted by the US government, it hits differently. For Quemado, it's not a mere game. He has to defeat the nazis.

Summer War is a synecdochical story of checkered Colonial/Imperialist history and the First World intervention in Latin America. Udo is an arrogant, yet naive man who thinks past memories and infatuations with the place give him the right to be there and stick his nose in other people's business. The film is an intriguing psychological study that is at once seductive and mesmerizing. Just like The Future, her previous Bolaño adaptation, Scherson relies on building a mood and tension rather than explaining things through dialog or narration while dealing with the complex geopolitical dynamics of the region.

Summer War plays part of Tribeca Film Festival on 6/7, 8, 12. For tickets and more info, please visit the festival website.

Haunted House Coming of Age Story

Caity (2026) - Calleran As our world hurtles toward darkness at a breathtaking speed, many filmmakers have tuned their lenses toward family dramas recently: Christian Petzold's Miroirs No.3, Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value and Hylnur Pálmason's The Love That Remains, to just name a few.

With that in mind, Caity explores the all-but-rare family drama: The precious father-daughter relationship that we don't see much in American films nowadays. It's a beautifully written and acted, incredibly well-crafted coming of age/arrested development story that deserves your attention, in the YouTube-grown, genre-dominated American movie scene in 2026. It signals the arrival of a major new talent in American cinema, writer/director Lindsay Calleran.

For the Clark household, it's a season to put up The Clark Family Haunt, a family operated haunted house attraction in upstate New York. We have the overly hyper dad Paul (Morgan Spector) trying to set up everything with the help of his younger teenage daughter Caity (Chiara Aurelia).

With inserts of home video footage of them goofing around and cracking jokes throughout the film, you can tell that Caity adores her dad to no end. With many townsfolk hired as workers for the Halloween season, it's an yearly tradition that Paul takes very seriously with his child-like glee.

While preparation is underway, we see brief glimpses of fractures appearing in the Clarks; mom (Emily Shaffer) tries to put on a sunny disposition, but there is a shade of sadness and tiredness in her expressions. Dana (Olivia Rouyre), Caity's older sister, who works as a waitress in a local restaurant, doesn't want anything to do with the haunted house business; either she grew out of it, or some past experiences irked her. There's chatter about AA meetings that Paul might be skipping.

Caity finds a hidden bottle of vodka in Paul's workshed, but decides to not say anything. She is either in denial that her dad isn't a perfect man, or is not taking his drinking problem seriously or trying to protect him; maybe all of the above.

At 16, Caity is still in a fuck-around-and-find out stage. There is definitely a willing hesitation in Caity not to grow up too fast. She hangs out with her best friend Petey (Michelle Mao), smoking weed, talking about boys and getting drugs from a local drug dealer. She flirts with Hannah (Jordan Hull) and the handsome twins Liam and Sean (played by Jonah and Christian Lees), who are all new recruits for the season. They hook up, play around at the job, and work under the influence, including drinking from dad's stashed bottle.

The Clark Family Haunt features some very innovative scares with laser beams and other gadgets, as well as traditional gothic settings where Caity and others act out in various parts and scenarios. It's a fun working environment for the most part.

Then there's the work behind the scenes; dealing with people's egos- their less than perfect work ethics, the payroll, and the rehearsals. One day, they find Paul locked in his office unconscious, overdosed on something. Things boil over in the Clark household. The season's not over yet, and now Caity is in charge of running the show while Paul checks into rehab.

When we love someone unconditionally, we overlook their imperfections, even though other people warn you about those bad traits in the ones you love. You defend them vehemently until you face the fact first-hand and can't ignore the grim reality anymore. Caity not only learns to accept Paul's problems, but gets to experience how easy it is to fall for the same addiction. She gets to share a deeper understanding of his afflictions.

Caity is a tender, funny and affecting film anchored by Chiara Aurelia, in her stellar lead performance. Her display of a deep emotional range is well beyond her years. She destined to be a major star.

The strong supporting cast includes Zach Cherry (from the Fallout series), Mao, Hull, West Liang (concerned local sherriff) and Shaffer. Calleran's script shines in its authenticity and honesty, dealing with arrested development issues and finding one's identity growing up. The brisk, effective, rhythmic editing by Joe Stankus also stands out, as does Jack Davis' natural camera work. I also loved the super imposition of closeups within the frame and split screen being favored over standard coverages for reaction shots and subtle emotional states.

In these trying times as the world is burning, it makes sense that many great artists put their focus inwards and rely on the family for comfort and strength. Caity exemplifies the need for the comfort and healing that a family provides when things are getting bleaker everyday in a chaotic world we are living in.

Caity enjoyed its world premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Festival tonight, and screens again June 8, June 11, and June 12. Pleae check Tribeca 2026 website for more info.

Furniture Store Labyrinth

Backrooms (2026) - Parsons The liminal spaces - a byproduct of the ever progressing, expanding capitalist world - the mall, corporate offices, underground subway stations, hospital wards, suburban cul-de-sacs, innercity public parks, abandoned housing have been the subject or background for numerous films, most notably, the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and J-horror auteurs in the 90s and 2000s, the Berlin School filmmakers of the 2000s - Petzold, Arslan, Schanelec, Köhler. These filmmakers delved into the anxiety of living in the modern world where mundane reality is just as scary as spirits and monsters.

Backrooms creator Kane Parsons, a teen who grabbed and expanded the now famous 4-chan meme of an empty old furniture store with eerie yellow walls and fluorescent overhead lights, made series of contents entirely using Blender and Aftereffects, where endless corridors leads you to nowhere and some unknown creature chasing you. Banking on digital pixel nostalgia and shaky POV camera of the 90s indie boom, Parsons helped create an urban lore where the Gen-Zers can congregate online.

Seeing the potential for the internet liminal horror on social media and videogames cum movie successes (the most recent example would be Skinamarink, Exit 8), A24 gave Kane Parsons, now a 20 years old, 10 million dollars to make a feature film with legit actors - Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. The result is a noble first attempt, albeit an underwhelming one.

Ejiofor plays Clark, who owns a failing furniture store - Captain Clark's Ottoman Empire (its confusing, discordant name is pointed out by his young part-time employees), in a strip mall in suburban southern California. He is an aspiring architect who is unhappy with life's disappointment. He regularly has sessions with his therapist Mary (Reinsve) where he reveals his past - his failure in life turned him into drinking and his wife left him. He has anger issues. In turn, Mary has her own demons, as seen in spurts of flashbacks and nightmares - her mentally unstable mother prevented her from going out and they become shut-ins (newspapers covering the entire windows kind), in their now demolished apartment. She wrote a book about opening windows in life which Clark religiously listens to (as an audio book on a tape).

Clark finds the backrooms by accident while sleeping in his furniture store showroom, when flickering overhead store lights lead him to check the circuit breakers, then discovers a sliver of light beaming through the basement wall. He marks the entrance with a blue painter's tape and recruits his two young employees, armed with a video camera and ropes to investigate the endless labyrinth of the backroom. And it goes horribly wrong.

Mary stops in the furniture store, after Clark misses his appointment and leaves a cryptic message on her phone. She finds Clark has been mapping the labyrinth of backrooms. And he encourages her to explore with him.

There is so much potential in Backrooms. The dizzying labyrinth, much of it actually physically built for the film, is impressive for its originality and surrealism - the impossible angles, strange walkways, ominous dark corners & random piles of furniture. With the help of eerie sound design and score, Backrooms provide some very unsettling vibes. The creature designs give some very scary moments also. And the implication of the creatures and scattered clothes and furniture and absurd landscape that these are our memories of a place, warped over the years by misremembering and misinterpretation, is an intriguing one.

But if Skinamarink was any indication, you can't make a feature film just with the vibe alone, unless it's short, jumbled youtube clips intended to be unnerving, with no need for narrative threads or any coherence. Here, the narratives/character backgrounds are forced and uninteresting. By the time the abrupt ending rolls around, Backroom feels like a missed opportunity - you want more of the backroom explorations, not the underdeveloped, stereotypical characters. The film is a 1990s digital nostalgia, remembered, reimagined by a 20-year-old who didn't live through the timeframe, instead, grew up on the internet and videogames. It's just vibes, distorted and context free, just like the inhabitants of the backrooms. But just like the original digital catnip Parsons created, I want more.

Bubble Gum vs Plutonium

The Man Who Stole the Sun (1979) - Hasegawa Kido (Kenji Sawada) is a high school science teacher, known to his pupils as bubble gum, because of his habit of constantly chewing and blowing bubbles. He is regarded as an eccentric, but harmless man. But Kido has only one thing in mind - to build an atomic bomb. In order to achieve his goal, he physically trains himself, and steals a gun, in order to break into a nuclear power plant facility to steal an isotope to extract enough plutonium for the bomb.

While Kido is planning this, he meets inspector Yamashita (Bunta Sugawara, Battles without Honor and Humanity series), a ridiculously straight-up G-man with a buzzcut, when an unhinged WWII veteran, armed with a machine gun and grenades, hijacks Kido's school bus full of students, demanding to talk to the emperor. After the ordeal, which results in Kido and Yamashita saving the day and the gunman dead, Kido takes Yamashita as a worthy future opponent.

The actual break-in to the nuclear powerplant and ensuing making the bombs in a makeshift lab in Kido's tiny apartment, has a slapstick comedy element to it.


The film is also extremely procedural - showing Kido's bomb making almost step-by-step, as if in an instructional video. After successfully making two bombs - one with just enough plutonium to be detectable, so the authorities would take him seriously, and the other full working bomb with the timer, Kido starts making demands in a series of calls, using a voice scrambler. But his demands are silly - to have a baseball game aired on TV in its entirety instead of cutting the broadcast off at 9pm (which was a standard), and to get the Rolling Stones perform in Japan. His frustration at the society is well defined, but not what he wants. Throw in a beautiful radio personality, Zero (Kimiko Sawai), who figures out who Kido really is, but instead of giving him up to the authorities, she takes his case as a big exclusive scoop. Even if it means she gets involved romantically with him, and knowing Kido is dying of radiation poisoning. The cat and mouse chase ensues between Kido and Yamashita.

The Man Who Stole the Sun balances on the tight rope between not-so-serious and serious, full on satire and serious inquiry into the nation's psyche - the miraculous post-war economic development and consumerism, the generational gap- exemplified by the long-haired, aloof, rebel without a cause Kido and the overly stereotypical G-man, the unbending public servant, Yamashita. And of course, underlying of it all - the nation's ironic dependence on its nuclear energy and it being the source of existential threat (Fukushima anyone?)

As the two and a half hour movie unfolds, things get more and more outrageous - the massive car chase, shootouts, helicopters, daring stunts. Hasegawa's film has the same manic energy and chaotic nature of Shinji Somai's 80s output.

Hobo Code

Passenger (2026) - Øvredal André Øvredal, Norwegian director behind Troll Hunter, Autopsy of Jane Doe and The Last Voyage of Demeter, created a little corner for himself in the American horror film scene with successful modest budget projects over the years. And his latest, Passenger, starring Lou Llobel and Jacob Scipio as a young couple in love, on the road together is a tight, surprisingly good horror film that has plenty of scares.

Tyler (Scipio) and Maddie (Llobel) are city folks embarking on a new life on the road in a bougie Mercedes van. Their whole lives are packed in the van and they are hitting the road. It's the opposite of Nomadland where people are living out of their vans out of economic necessity, but these young couples are what the Winnebago community in a trailer park calls "Air bnb on wheels" folks.

It's Tyler's idea of retiring early and being free on the road, but Maddie is not so sure. It is extra hard to object, when he puts a lot of effort into this new life and thinks their love will be the only thing that they need. The thing is, any way you cut it, they are an adorable couple and we don't want anything bad to happen to them. But things start happening.

While they are on the road, they witness the aftermath of a brutal car crash. Since then, Maddie is seeing a scary figure in the corner of her eyes. There are deep scratch marks on the side of the van, which they later find out that it's a warning sign in a hobo code to be on the lookout for danger.

Their road trip on Route 66 turns out to be less ideal than Tyler anticipated, but downright scary with this 'passenger' attaching itself to them.

The couple learns that the only way to lose this scary ghoul is driving to the creepy abandoned church of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, somewhere off the beaten path in the desert near Grand Junction,CO.

In Passenger, jump scares are plenty and tension building is top notch. Øvredal uses all the tricks in the scary road movie genre tropes - car engine stalling, flat tires in the middle of nowhere, scary parking spaces at night with unreliable, flickering street lights combined with supernatural elements, debunking the American romanticism of hitting the road.

Tower to Power

The Wizard of the Kremlin (2025) - Assayas Based on a fictional account by Giuliano Da Empoli, Olivier Assayas, the one of the most astute observers of our ever evolving, complex world, takes on Putin's Russia in recent history, with the star studded international cast. The result is perhaps short on the satisfying narrative, but a fascinating history lesson nonetheless.

The film starts with an American journalist, Rowland (Jeffrey Wright), visiting Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), a former spin doctor of Putin living in isolation in the suburbs of Moscow. Baranov pulls out a yarn of the chaotic, exciting days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As a young man eager to prove himself, Baranov moves into the city filled with other young people, eager to take advantage of the anything-goes, wild-west of the Yeltsin era Russia. While others are busy making money and signaling the dawn of the future oligarchs, Baranov chooses art in avant-garde theater. There, he meets a punk performance artist Ksenia (Alicia Vikander) whom he would have a long off/on relationship with. His work in art leads him to TV and communications and works up the ladder and becomes a producer of a recently privatized national TV station, with the help of Berezovsky (Will Keen), a reigning spin doctor with political connections. The Chechen war was going badly and the Russian public was in need of change.

There's a funny bit about Yeltsin's sagging popularity and his alcoholism and in order to make him more 'presidential' on TV for his reelection, they have to tie him to the chair in order not have have him fall asleep at the desk and slow down the teleprompter speed.

Since Yeltzin is a goner, Berezovsky bets on a former KGB head, young & athletic Vladimir Putin (Jude Law) to be his successor. And this is where things get interesting. Putin, a disciplined former intelligence officer and spy, unlike other politicians in Russia, is not interested in money and wants to have no interference in government from newly minted oligarchs. And he hates the frivolity of TV and spins. Admirer of Stalin, he wants absolute power. While Ksenia moves from one billionaire to another, Baranov becomes a trusted counsel for Putin after his verticality of power speech, pushing his strongman image as what is needed in Russia.

Dano, in his puff dough face and forever smug, fits the role of Baranov, who observes the world with forever cynicism and insincerity. When asked about why he stayed so long by Putin's side, he admits that he is addicted to power. Law is scary as Putin, a one-track minded former intelligence officer and spy, who detests moneyed people and the west. Someone who wants to wield power in a geopolitical game in the new era.

Tom Sturridge shows up as Dimitri Sidorov, a flashy, hedonistic oligarch in the making, of whom Ksenia falls for.

There are tons of films about Russia's recent history, but Assayas makes a somewhat concise overview of how Putin's Russia came about. He juxtaposes the real threat of the strongman who does play by western capitalist standards. Baranov, who was fashioned after Vladislav Surkov, a spin doctor who served Putin in his aggressive pursuit of Crimea and then Ukraine. Obviously, these are villains. But aren't they as villainous as Europe and the US? As Rawland asks about the invasion of Ukraine and violence Baranov orchestrated, overseen by Putin, Baranov counters with all the villainy the West has been inflicting to the world at large. Aren't we as culpable as Putin - Venezuela, Cuba, Iraq and Iran?

Narratively The Wizard loses steam on the way to its fatalistic, unsatisfying ending. But again, Assayas accomplishes deciphering the complicated recent history and reflects on where we find ourselves, at this chaotic, morally ugly present.

Gen Z Detective Agency

Debut, Or Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued (2025) - Castronovo A female narrator tells us how she came in possession of a laptop and a handwritten diary of Julian Castronovo, a young aspiring filmmaker who disappeared while researching his subject that he came across in a New York apartment by accident. So starts Debut, Or Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued, an auto-fiction, a mystery within a mystery about a young filmmaker and a missing art forger. Castronovo introduces himself in a webcam- his age, his height, his proportionally bigger head compared with the rest of his body, and what is about to unfold in his debut feature. His trajectory is not dissimilar to that of hundreds of other young aspiring American filmmakers - moving to New York, then LA, pulling some shady connections and struggling while doing odd-end jobs to survive. Let's set aside his good looks and pompous title for the time being, because his investigation into a missing Chinese art forger is, indeed, very intriguing.

With some connection from a friend, he landed an apartment in New York. While repainting the walls, he finds a hard copy of Don Quixote and a drawing of a deer with three digit numbers written in the back in a hidden compartment. Doing some online research, he finds the former tenant was an art forger from China who worked for the landlord who turned out to be a gallery owner. The gallery owner later got busted for fraud and served prison terms. But the forger disappeared and has been missing for twenty years.

Castronovo moves to LA. There he hustles with fake business cards that he works for various movie studios and assumes a Chandler-esque detective identity- wearing black suits and ties from his catering server job. His hustling eventually catches the eye of a mid-level independent movie producer and together they shop around for funding to make a very movie about the mystery about the disappearance of the art forger. Some more mysterious phone calls later, he gets a hold of a box full of videotapes and other trinkets that belong to the disappeared forger, Fawn Ma. They reveal that Ma was not only a forgery artist but a conceptual performance artist which we see the glimpses of throughout the film.

The short feature is done very economically: there's no actual footage of any action. It's done through narration and webcam footage of himself talking. Any location shots are done with puppets donning Robert Smith hair. The rest are static shots of clues left behind by the forger and her art work - short videos, photos. With the photos of the forger pointing finger at objects and buildings, Castronovo tracks down her whereabouts, using google maps. And it turns out to be in the Czech Republic, coincidentally the place where an interested mysterious investor resides as well.

I have to give Castronovo credit for creating an entertaining yarn in a short feature with no budget. Debut hooks you in and never lets you go. It's an enjoyable ride spiked with ingenuity and creativity suited for social media generation, doing a lot with so little.

Rhythm of Life

Variations on a Theme (2026) - Delmar, Jacobs Devon Delmar and Jason Jacobs's Variations on a Theme is a quiet revelation of a film. Shot entirely in the small rural community of Kharkams in Kamiesberge mountains in Western South Africa, it records the daily lives of Hettie, an 80 year old goat herder and her neighbors. With a stationary camera and wide frames, it records sunrises and sunsets and everything in between, as the narration (by Jason Jacobs, a grandson of Hettie) unhurriedly informs us that some town-wide scam is in progress. On the radio and loud speakers from a car, they are asking the residents, many of whom are descendents of WWII veterans, to turn in 'the blue form' to get reparation money the government owes them. According to the narrator, black South African soldiers were only compensated with a pair of army boots and a bicycle when they returned after the war.

All of the residents are swept up in the scam, paying exorbitant fees to file the form - "to spend money to get money". Even stoic Hettie is swept up in it. But daily life goes on. She lets out the goats in the morning, gets water from the town water tank (which serves also as the town teenagers hangout), chat with her neighbors, use the communal outhouse, watch some TV shows and see the sun goes down over the rolling, picaresque hills from her porch. Others play dominoes outside the ramshackle supermarket and children play in the playground.

Delmar and Jacobs build a gentle rhythm through repetition, in Variations on a Theme. It lulls viewers into a warm, comfortable and inviting place, where every day is pretty much the same. Hettie's daily routine goes on, the local dreamer who sleeps outside still dreams of a woman he met in the 70s. The sun goes down every night, providing a spectacular sunset every time. The cramped houses and their colorful walls and live animals, everything in the film is laid back and unchanging. The commotion comes from people still anxiously holding on to a hope for the reparations to kick in, which they believe, will come any day now - Gladwin, the local hairdresser, ordered all new supplies, expecting to get paid from the fund. Domino players talk about taking an overseas trip with the money.

Hettie's birthday is coming and according to the narrator, her large family from the city that she seldom talks to will be coming for her birthday, even though she is pretty much 'detached' now and started to enjoy her isolation and solitude ever since her husband's passing. After the hectic birthday celebration, and her large family staying in her small house for several days, Hettie's daughter suggests that she come and live with them in the city. She is not getting any younger and it is time to leave behind the inconvenience of rural living.

The storm's brewing from the distant, Hettie's milk on her nightstand falls and shatters on the ground. The change is coming. Delmar and Jacobs observe all these in an unhurried fashion, lamenting silently on the inevitability of time passing and changing way of life. Beautiful work.

Dumb Waiter

Hokum (2026) - McCarthy Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy's third outing has all the hallmarks of his two very scary predecessors: everything has to do with an elaborate scheme taking place in one isolated location. Once the mechanics of action are laid out- which takes some time, the film begins to click in its scary ways. And as with Caveat and Oddity, Hokum is scary, good fun.

American writer Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), is visiting Bilberry Woods Hotel for two reasons- to finish the ending of his Conquistador trilogy and scatter his parents ashes in nearby woods, because his parents stayed in the hotel when they were honeymooning. But Ohm is not a friendly fellow. He is arrogant and dismissive. He snaps at the old proprietor (Brendan Conroy) of the inn telling a spooky tale to the local children about how he trapped a witch in his hotel, calling him an old fool believing in superstitions. He admonishes Alby (Will O'Connell), a bell hop who is an aspiring writer, for asking for his autograph, rude to Fiona (Florence Odesh) the barkeep, all at his arrival. He later bonds with Fiona a little bit, because she reminds him of his dead mother.

The rumor has it, there's a witch who is haunting the place and the honeymoon suite is off limits because of that. You know that the suite is going to be opened up and will be the main location for most of the action taking place later on. Ohm is also carrying the guilt of the accidental death of his mother when he was a child. We see the glimpse of her ghost still haunting him and that he is in a depressive state.

Ohm encounters Jerry (David Wilmot), who lives in his van and drinking mushroom laced milk in the woods. Taking Jerry as a quack, Ohm dismisses his telltale stories about the witch and haunting of the hotel.

After Fiona and Alby discovering Ohm hanging from the ceiling, from an apparent suicide attempt, Ohm is hospitalized and recovers few weeks later. When he comes back to the hotel to gather his stuff, Ohm finds the hotel is closing for the season and Fiona has gone missing since Halloween night a couple of weeks back. Jerry is a prime suspect in Fiona's disappearance. Ohm runs into him in the woods again and Jerry suggests breaking in to the hotel after everyone clears out. Jerry is certain that they are keeping Fiona up in the Honeymoon suite.

The rest is pure McCarthy - repetition of the elevator and dumb waiter going up and down, the secret corridors in the basement, isolation and suffocation anxiety, the cat and mouse game with folklore tinged supernatural occurances. Plenty of jumpscare and hallucinogenic imagery- reoccuring rabbit creature references throughout his filmography, all mingle perfectly with the tense atmosphere McCarthy creates (out of little to nothing). Adam Scott playing the world-class asshole also helps with absurd humor. All the creepy details McCarthy puts in - the cherubic sculptures, the creepy rabbit mask, Fiona's rabbit costume, the grandfather clock, etc.

Hokum might not be as scary as Oddity, but it shows what McCarthy is capable of with a bigger budget and a Hollywood actor. I can't wait to see more from McCarthy.