Pedro Almodóvar has spent more than 45 years making movies about himself without fully flipping the mirror. The provocateur-turned-veteran (and Golden Lion winner for 2024’s The Room Next Door) has dressed his obsessions––desire, motherhood, illness, the movies themselves––in melodrama and technicolor and handed them to others, from the frenzied ensemble of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in the ’80s to the more poised, patient, and sincere characters of recent years. But with Pain and Glory, Almodóvar centered himself and his struggles in searing spotlight. Bitter Christmas isn’t quite so harsh, but it picks up with the autofiction where Pain and Glory left off, characterizing and criticizing the filmmaker through an alter ego of an alter ego.

The meta, nesting-doll plot follows Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a film director, as she spends a long, unpleasant, memory-ridden December weekend in Madrid in 2004 before embarking on her third film. Meanwhile, in 2026, Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a filmmaker in the middle of a creative drought, is writing her story, which happens to be a lightly disguised version of his own. As he does, the script begins to bleed into the lives of those around him, including his assistant, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), who is furious to find herself on the page.

Bitter Christmas raises questions about the people who end up as material and those who use them. Who owns a life once it’s been turned into a screenplay? How much of another person’s pain is a writer entitled to borrow? What does a filmmaker make of the complicated feelings that come after prying into subjects’ lives? Almodóvar has always kept his life and his work in close conversation, but here they’re one in the same.

Ahead of the film’s release, we sat down with Almodóvar to talk about how his approach to style has evolved over the years, the transformation of pain through art, the difference between self-critique and regret, and, of course, color.

The Film Stage: Your work these days is more restrained in its evocation of style. I’m thinking about the way that in, say, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, almost every shot is some sort of experiment or style exercise, compared to Bitter Christmas or The Room Next Door, where it’s much more about framing the character and their setting more plainly, perhaps more accessibly.

Pedro Almodóvar: First of all: I’m happy to have changed, because you can’t always be making the same movie. If you think about the ’80s, which are the films from my youth, they’re really the films from when democracy was just taking hold in Spain, and young people had access to liberties that they did not have before. So my films were much more baroque—sort of scandalous, if you like. Or at least some people were scandalized by them. They were also exaggerated. And so I needed that explosion to be able to also reflect what was happening democratically.

It’s also a kind of natural evolution that has to do with the passing of time, and my own experience, and my own wish to not repeat myself. If I had started being an austere director, it might be the case that now I would be a more baroque director. I would say that the first change in my films probably happened in the ’90s, right around the time All About My Mother, Talk to Her, and Bad Education came out. In a way, you could call them my sort of more adult films. And they were not films that were necessarily deeper, but they were in fact more complex. And the films where things like sickness and pain begin to appear.

And I would say that another point of inflection for me, and the point where my filmmaking truly became much more austere, begins with Julieta. It’s also part of a natural process, again, with the kind of lifestyle that you lead. In the ’80s, I lived surrounded by people going out 24 hours a day. By the 2000s I had, in essence, pulled away from social life, and my style for this particular film is also adapting to the three stories by Alice Munro. Those stories demanded of me a more contained and sober style of storytelling that was new for me and that I found very, very attractive. And it was a mode of narration that I continued to want to explore, and I felt that need to continue to be sober and austere even though my stories are still recognizable. They’re still, fortunately, my stories, but they’ve also changed. So I keep challenging myself, if you like, to use less and less elements in my filmmaking but use them in a way that helps me go deeper into my stories.

Bitter Christmas makes the case that not all suffering should be turned into a story. Do you ever feel that about your own material, or about the material you’re working with?

There is something about pain that lends itself to more inspiration, or is perhaps more interesting than pleasure, or inspires me more. It’s an interesting thing to explore. But there’s something about pain, particularly when you find it in people surrounding you or in situations surrounding you that are painful. It’s like there’s more to say about pain than there is about happiness.

Can you talk about the disparate structures between Pain and Glory and Bitter Christmas?

I think they’re like twin films. They’re like a diptych. In Pain and Glory, I talk about the physical pain, the variety of physical pains that the protagonist has, and how that limits him. And also the pain of the preoccupation of the fact that he can’t work. Because, you know, I also have this surgery in my back, and the thing is that you cannot be stood up for more than half an hour. So it’s a limitation, and shooting is very physical. So, I mean, the protagonist, he was afraid to not keep making movies, and that was a big suffering for him.

In Bitter Christmas, there is also a pain, but it’s more like a moral pain based on the fact that the protagonist is living in a period of four or five years where he doesn’t find anything interesting. Because he needs, like me, to have a script that’s really, really passionate. You live with passion, and this is the same way that I live to make movies. I mean, this is more than work, yes. I do it passionately, and this is the only way, and if you don’t feel that, then I don’t do it. And I never felt, in my experience, this kind of hiatus of four or five years, of not being completely hooked on the script that he was doing. This is very painful, very painful, especially for someone who the first and last and only thing that matters to you is making films.

One of the things that we have to think about in the film is that, you know, when the pain that you find in your surroundings—it might be kind of an ambiguous, morally ambiguous thing to decide that you’re going to latch on to that and develop that particular story. And that’s where you have to start to think about the limits of autofiction, in the sense that you have to ask yourself how much of that story are you going to include, how much are you going to exclude, are you going to keep yourself from telling some parts of that story or not. And this is one of the debates that the film actually picks up. Because at these very moments, the writer is only thinking about themselves, right? Once that idea comes to the writer, he stops thinking about the person that might have inspired the writing, and you start to think about the idea as the thing that is helping you develop the script. And in that sense writers are not quite so narcissistic, but certainly they’re selfish. And we can be dangerous.

In terms of your recent autofiction, Pain and Glory really forgives its protagonist, and it stuck out to me in Bitter Christmas that Mónica directly indicts Raúl. It makes me wonder: has growing older made you harder on yourself, or has something else in life made you harder on yourself?

One should be hard on oneself and not be complacent either with what you’re doing or with your own life. From the second that I’m writing Sbaraglia’s character as sort of my alter ego, the last thing I want to do is be self-complacent. I actually want to be more self-critical, and in fact I sort of turn out to write myself, or in this case the character, as the villain of the film, in a way, because I do think that it’s dangerous to be self-complacent. And it’s not so much a question about whether you forgive yourself or not, but it’s more about not wanting to sort of glorify myself in my own work, but rather to be conscious of those ways in which some of what I do myself might be ambiguous or questionable. And I think, you know, in that sense it was a healthy process for me, and also a fun process for me.

Do you feel like you have become more critical of yourself over the years?

I mean, I don’t regret anything that I did. I don’t regret even if I made many mistakes. The feeling of regret is a very Catholic feeling. I run away from that. In this movie I talk about creation and its relation with life, with reality. And that was always a topic that really fascinated me, and I was very interested in it from the beginning. But the creation process is very mysterious. You don’t know how it happens. I mean, the important thing is just to pay attention, but when it happens, you have to catch it. But you don’t know exactly. I mean, at least I don’t know. It depends on many, many things. So I always was fascinated by that relation between creation and life. And in this case, I think that relation is very organic. It’s an organic part of the story. And I think I’m quite satisfied with how it is in the movie, so I think this is the last time that I talk about myself so directly. And also about the creation process.

You said that you don’t have any regrets about anything. Is there any feeling similar to regret, like a feeling that you wish you would’ve done something differently or treated someone differently?

I was raised in a Judeo-Christian tradition, right, where you have the concepts of sin and punishment, and that’s something I’ve always rejected from the get-go. As an ideology, even. It doesn’t mean that I’m not conscious that sometimes I did something wrong. Right? I don’t regret it. It’s not like I’m not conscious that I’ve made mistakes, or I’ve done something wrong that could have been done a different way. It’s more like I find it almost like a useless exercise to question myself, because at the end of the day, you’ve already done what you’ve done, and what I think is more useful is to sort of understand that this is also a part of you, that it’s also part of who you are, that it’s part of life that you’ve also made these mistakes.

And so really the work is more for me about recognizing both the good parts and the bad parts of myself, and that becomes part of my whole identity. I might feel differently about, say, if the question is about really hurting someone. I don’t think I have hurt anyone, but if that were the case, I think that is something to regret.

You just mentioned this is probably your last autobiographical film, at least for now. What do you see coming next? What kind of stories do you want to tell?

When you think about a writer writing a story, you’re always going to be in some way inspired by the things that surround you, right? Because you’re sort of working with a story, but the details on which that story rests are part of your real life at some level, and they’re seeping into the narrative. So in that sense, they’re always slightly autobiographical. But as far as wanting to make any more stories about myself as a director, where I have to sort of, you know, have somebody reflect myself within the film, that’s something that really doesn’t appeal to me right now.

What appeals to me right now is to think about stories that are happening sort of outside of my house, outside of home. Right now I have about two to three stories. One of them is almost done, one of them is halfway there, the other one is just a set of notes, and they’re all very, very different from the story that I’ve just told. The three stories that I’m working on are stories that are actually pushing me to go outside my house, outside my comfort zone, outside of what I know. I’m having to do some research. I’m having to look at other realities, other professions, other people. Because I’m really tired of myself.

Color has always played such a major role in your films, regardless of style. It’s always such a significant communicator of theme and tone and what’s going on in the film. How do you address color going into a film? Do you write it into the screenplay? Are you finding the colors as you make the film? Are they all planned out in pre-production?

I usually start visualizing the story after having the first script, but I know that this is part of myself. I mean, I have an inner palette of colors that I’m going to use in all my movies, because they are really part of my sensibility. This is something unconscious. In any case, for example, I was raised in the decade of the ’60s, and it was the pop style. So I was raised by the pop culture of the ’60s, but that was when I was very young, very adolescent. But after, in Madrid, the ’80s were again a new period of pop culture, because at that moment we didn’t have a dictatorship, and that explosion became something very pop in terms of music, of colors, of ways of living, of everything. And I belonged to that culture.

And also, as a director, I remember when I was a child, the movies that I saw were always in Technicolor. And the Technicolor was very bright with a lot of contrast. In a way, I’m looking for the colors of my childhood, and that’s impossible because it depended on the chemical liquids that they used. But I just try to put all the colors in front of the camera. Because I’m involved in everything, in every detail of the production design. And I do it through intuition.

I always wanted to make a representation of life, of reality. So I never did, and I’m not going to do, let’s say, a naturalistic movie, where everything you see is like it is in real life. This is not my style. I mean, I can give you an example: the Dardenne brothers or Ken Loach. I feel very far from that style because I prefer to represent life and reality. And there is always something artificial.

Bitter Christmas opens in theaters on Friday, November 13.

The restoration event of the year, recently crossing $4 million at the domestic box office, the definitive, uncensored director’s cut of Ken Russell’s The Devils will now be arriving on 4K UHD on April 20, 2027. The 3-disc Collector’s Edition will include the 4K UHD presentation of the director’s cut as well as all three versions of the film for the first time ever on Blu-ray, while the standard 4K UHD edition will include the director’s cut and new bonus material. The complete details on the bonus material have also now been unveiled.

Both the Collector’s and Standard 4K UHD editions are now available to pre-order. The Collector’s Edition includes a rigid slipcase with an 8-panel 3-disc holder and a 96-page book. There is more than 14 hours of material, including the Director’s Cut encoded by Fidelity in Motion on a 4K UHD disc; the Director’s Cut, UK X-rated cut, and US R-rated cut on a Blu-ray disc; and a Blu-ray disc including never-before-seen bonus material. The standard 4K UHD includes more than 4 hours of material in a slipcase with an 8-panel 1-disc digipak. This disc includes the Director’s Cut encoded by Fidelity in Motion and new bonus material.

Check out the details below, as well as our conversation with Mark Kermode on the podcast, which you can subscribe to here.

Ken Russell’s The Devils 3-Disc 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Collector’s Edition contains the following:

• The first ever 4K UHD presentation of Ken Russell’s The Devils – the uncensored, definitive director’s cut – encoded by Fidelity In Motion with a newly restored monaural soundtrack.
• The first ever official Blu-ray presentations of Ken Russell’s The Devils, the uncensored, definitive director’s cut (114 mins); the UK X-Rated version (111 mins); and the US R-Rated version (108 mins), with a newly restored monaural soundtrack.
• Unedited 2004 audio commentary with Ken Russell, Michael Bradsell, Mark Kermode & Paul Joyce
• Never-before-seen extended scene
• New extended version of the documentary Hell on Earth: The Desecration and Resurrection of The Devils (2002) featuring additional interview footage with Ken Russell
• New 4K remaster of the short film Amelia and the Angel (1958) directed by Ken Russell
• New compilation of camera slates
• New interview with Guillermo del Toro on The Devils and the legacy of Ken Russell
• New introduction by Kleber Mendonça Filho at the first ever screening of Ken Russell’s The Devils in Brazil
• New extended interview with Mark Kermode on The Devils and the reconstruction of the definitive director’s cut
• New behind-the-scenes featurette on the picture and sound restoration 
• Never-before-seen archival interviews with Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed
• Never-before-heard archival audio interviews between critic Richard Crouse and cast/crew
• Never-before-seen costume sketches by Shirley Russell with audio commentary by Victoria Russell
• Excerpt of Rupert Russell’s documentary Mad Dad, featuring never-before-seen Russell family photos
• 2004 Q&A with Ken Russell and Mark Kermode following the first ever screening of Ken Russell’s The Devils at the BFI Southbank NFT1
• 2010 Film at Lincoln Center Q&A with Ken Russell and Vanessa Redgrave
• Director of Devils (1971) featurette with behind-the-scenes footage and a Ken Russell interview
• Behind-the-scenes footage with commentary by Michael Bradsell
• Archival Trailers
• 2026 Theatrical Trailer
• 96-page book with never-before-seen photography and production materials, excerpts of the original continuity script, new essays by Mark Kermode and Linda Ruth Williams, and newly unearthed archival crew interviews 
• and more…

Ken Russell’s The Devils 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc Standard Edition contains the following:

• The first ever 4K UHD presentation of Ken Russell’s The Devils – the uncensored, definitive director’s cut – encoded by Fidelity In Motion with a newly restored monaural soundtrack.
• Unedited 2004 audio commentary with Ken Russell, Michael Bradsell, Mark Kermode & Paul Joyce
• New interview with Guillermo del Toro on The Devils and the legacy of Ken Russell
• 2004 Q&A with Ken Russell and Mark Kermode following the first ever screening of Ken Russell’s The Devils at the BFI Southbank NFT1
• Behind-the-scenes footage with commentary by Michael Bradsell
• Director of Devils (1971) featurette with behind-the-scenes footage and a Ken Russell interview
• Archival Trailers
• 2026 Theatrical Trailer

Lee Chang-dong has never been in a hurry. The novelist-turned-filmmaker (and one-time South Korean minister of culture) has made just seven features in nearly thirty years; Peppermint Candy, Secret Sunshine, and Burning among the most celebrated, each a patient, piercing portrait of ordinary people pushed to the edge. Needless to say, the eight years since Burning have felt like a long time to wait for another. Now, Lee is back with Possible Love, featuring an immersive quartet of characters and an ethical puzzle only he could jigsaw together so effectively. The film premiered in Venice in September, where it won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize (and FIPRESCI Prize) 24 years after Oasis earned Lee the Silver Lion for Best Director.

The setup is simple: two couples on opposite sides of a class divide, brought together by the making of a documentary. Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) is a factory worker who was laid off after a labor strike came to a brutal end, the story loosely based on the 2009 Ssangyong Motor layoffs. Meanwhile, his wife, Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), tries to hold their family together in the aftermath. At a funeral, they meet Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), a filmmaker making a documentary about the injustices of the labor movement, and her wealthy husband, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung). Of course, Ye-ji sees Ho-seok as the perfect subject, and soon the situation starts to get muddy.

Over nearly three hours, the two couples become entangled as suppressed feelings, professional ambitions (or the severe lack thereof), and hidden desires surface. Lee, for his part, makes no secret that these are questions he’s asking of himself, too. On the heels of the film’s Netflix release, we sat down with the acclaimed writer-director to talk about the ethics of the camera’s gaze, the subject’s relationship to the storyteller, and the potential for union and solidarity between art and labor.

The Film Stage: I want to start by asking you about the role of a filmmaker in a subject’s life, because that’s such a big part of this film. The winding ethics of that situation serve as the dramatic thrust of the film. So what do you think is the role of a documentary filmmaker documenting a subject’s life?

Lee Chang-dong: While this film shows a character who’s a documentary filmmaker and tells the story partly about the attitude, the ethics, and the distance between the documentary filmmaker and her subject, it’s also a question that I want to raise through the story. Documentary filmmakers, more so than feature filmmakers, are more sensitive to this line of ethics, I think. And that’s because they are closer to the subject that they’re portraying. You know, depending on what kind of person they’re portraying, what kind of pain they’re capturing, how deep the wounds are, and the other elements at play. Of course, the ethics or the distance or attitude would be different.

However, this is something that feature filmmakers are a part of as well, and they tend to be less sensitive to this issue. With the material that they deal with—stories of war, refugees, victims of violence or marginalized people—oftentimes these subjects just become sheer material or, you know, consumed for entertainment and even, at times, they go so far as to be exploited. And so in this film I wanted to discuss and raise questions about the gaze of the camera and the distance between the camera and its subjects.

Have you ever wanted to make a documentary? And regardless of whether you have or haven’t, in what ways do you see yourself as the documentary filmmaker in Possible Love?

There were a couple times that I wanted to shoot a documentary, but it never got made. And this character Ye-ji, she has a very wealthy husband. She is married to a power of capital. Despite that, she wants to be independent from it and tries to find her own identity as a filmmaker. In that sense, while I am a feature filmmaker, I think our positions can be connected and be quite similar. As a filmmaker, I cannot make films without leaning on capital, and Netflix, with whom I worked together for Possible Love, could be part of that huge capital. And maybe you could say that I’m also married to wealth in that sense as well, and I have my own efforts of maintaining my own independent voice, and in that sense I think Ye-ji and myself, we are like mirrors that reflect one another.

Photo by Godlis, courtesy of the 64th New York Film Festival / Film at Lincoln Center

Do you find Ye-ji’s presence in her subject’s life intrusive? I ask this because at the beginning and through early stages of the film, it seems like, for lack of a better term, she’s a villain or that there’s something wrong about the way she’s approaching the film and her subjects. As the story goes on, it becomes much more involved and complex than that. And there’s not this hero-villain, good-bad duality. But, in all of that, is getting the interview a force for good in the subjects’ lives or invasive? 

In the beginning, you see the scene in the funeral where Ye-ji is trying to do a sketch with her camera. When Mi-ok and Ho-seok get into this quarrel that feels very out of place in a grave funeral setting, she holds her camera up to them. And when Ho-seok resists and sort of yells at her, saying, “Is this amusing for you?” she immediately responds, “I’m sorry, I’ll turn it off.” And with that scene, I wanted to show not only Ye-ji’s personality as a character, but also the true nature of a documentary filmmaker, and, even further, the true nature of the camera. This is not an aggressiveness that’s unique to her as a character, but it’s really connected to the nature of the camera. 

The camera is bound to be drawn to anything that is more entertaining, more dramatic, or more provocative. At times that nature of the camera is much like its power dynamic, where the one holding the camera is given power and, depending on how that power is used, it shapes the ethics of the camera’s perspective. After that, you know, Ye-ji tries to get deeper into the lives and pains of these people, and through these things I wanted to raise the question and bring the audience to think about these various different layers of gazes: the gaze of the documentary filmmaker, the gaze of us as we look into others’ lives, and even the gaze of the audience as they watch the film. I wanted them to be aware of all of these different gazes altogether.

Do you think there’s a tension between the labor movement, the economic crisis that’s borne it, and working in the arts? I don’t necessarily mean a documentary filmmaker, but just anyone working in the arts. Let’s say a crew member on a film, for example: do you think there’s a conflict of interest between the subject in the film, who is prey to this terrible crisis, and the people who are trying to make art about it to make a living? Or perhaps a union between them?

I think there could be a union between them. At least when the actual strike took place, there was a sense of union and solidarity between the ones taking part in the strike and those, like the documentary filmmakers at the time, who wanted to tell their story to the world. I think, fundamentally, between art and pain and struggle, a union or solidarity is bound to take place.

Of course it’s a different issue to discuss when we consider the ethics of the camera or the fundamental dynamics between the two. However, I still think that—not only for documentary filmmakers but also feature filmmakers like myself—when it comes to art or artists, they are somewhere in between a laborer and capital, right? So at times you could say that they’re neutral. In another sense, you could say that they’re cowardly. However, I still believe that the goal of art is to tell their story.

Possible Love is now on Netflix.

An anniversary well worth celebrating, the standard of quality when it comes to the releases of Grasshopper Film is simply unmatched in the world of international cinema. Bringing films by Kleber Mendonça Filho, Hong Sangsoo, Jem Cohen, Albert Serra, Bertrand Bonello, Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, Bi Gan, Pedro Costa, Claire Denis, Alain Gomis, Oliver Laxe, Tsai-ming Liang, Michael Almereyda, Eduardo Williams, and many more to the U.S., the NY-based distributor is now celebrating its 10th anniversary with a special retrospective at Metrograph featuring a selection of standout films. Ahead of the series beginning December 4, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the trailer.

Titles in the series include Afternoons of Solitude, Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Gueule d’Amour, Kaili Blues, Leviathan, Museum Hours, Nocturama, and The Power of Kangwon Province, featuring a​ Q&A with Jem Cohen for Museum Hours on Friday, December 4 and Q&A with Lucien Castaing-Taylor for Leviathan on Sunday, December 6, with more Q&As to be announced. The series coincides with their release of Kogonada’s zi, which opened in theaters on November 6, as well as the recent release of Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s Chronovisor earlier this fall.

“Grasshopper was started with two simple beliefs,” said founder Ryan Krivoshey. “First, in films that take risks and approach the world in ways we haven’t seen before. And second, in audiences who share that curiosity, who are eager to discover work that surprises and astonishes, and challenges our ideas of what cinema can be. Over these past 10 years, it’s been incredibly gratifying to see these beliefs affirmed again and again. We’re grateful to everyone who’s come along with us on this journey and excited for what comes next.”

Watch the exclusive trailer premiere below and learn more here.

A few years after his widely acclaimed Harold Pinter collaboration The Servant, Joseph Losey reteamed with the writer for Accident, starring Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, and Jacqueline Sassard. Newly restored by the BFI National Film Archive in association with Studiocanal, the drama will now begin a theatrical run at Film Forum, courtesy of Rialto Pictures, starting December 18 before expanding nationally in select markets, and we’re pleased to debut the new trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “Stephen (Dirk Bogarde), a married Oxford professor, struggles with his sexual attraction to young Austrian student Anna (Jacqueline Sassard) and subtly competes with his friend Charley (Stanley Baker) and pupil William (Michael York) for her affections. Unfolding with screenwriter Pinter’s trademark time-shifting, and framed by the rupture of a violent car crash, Accident explores hidden tensions and the moral gray areas of desire.”

With a screenplay by Nobel Prize-winning English playwright Harold Pinter (his third collaboration with Losey following The Servant and The Go-Between), Accident won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival (1967), was named one of the National Board of Review’s Top Ten Films (1967), received the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for Best British Screenplay (1968), and was nominated for four BAFTAs, including Best British Film, Best British Actor (Dirk Bogarde), and Best British Screenplay (Harold Pinter).

See the exclusive trailer premiere below.

The next generation of filmmakers show deep promise; sometimes you just have to go very far to find them. The best things I saw at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival were all world premieres arriving in the last days of a year-long cinema cycle that begins early, runs late, and recirculates the same two-dozen-ish titles until they’re defined by largely unanimous critical stances. It’s easy, above all convenient, to look at a list of unknown works by even-more-obscure filmmakers and assume they’ve not ascended for good reason. Lord knows that suspicion has times it proves wholly correct. I also would—please, God, I hope this goes without saying—never trade that benign deference for the great satisfaction of first contact, nor understand what gaps (for festivals and distributors alike) some of these films can fall through.

What proved largely admirable but didn’t quite make this best-of-fest cut—Takenoshin Yaza’s Hinotama: Ball of Fire and Shingo Matsumura’s Between Us especially come to mind—did so on the basis of a few choices I found charming as much as they’re too-impulsive, or charming precisely for their overzealousness. Where more and more big-ticket titles nowdays engender a response that largely comes down to “yes, nice, I understand” and the ensuing desire to get on with one’s day, what a fortune contending with choices that spark some thought. Regarding the 24-year-old Yaza: I found enough in Hinotama intelligent and surprising to suggest his debut feature will come to be known as the instigation of a notable career. (For a deeper take on its unique strengths, I’d suggest listening to my podcast conversation with Mark Asch.)

Below are some thoughts on Tokyo’s 2026 premieres, but it’s best to start by looking back.

A Note on Four Restorations

Though Tokyo efficiently showcases new work by talent unknown in North America, most often the world, well-programmed retrospectives and restorations will naturally eclipse most anything else. Even by ongoing standards, their 2026 edition was a cut above. Leading the pack was a 13-title Kenji Mizoguchi retrospective housing seven new restorations. While I could’ve saved some time (and seen more of the city) by finally watching The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum on my flight (or in any of the many years a decent copy has been available) I allowed sentiment—the kind born of commingling a long-fulfilled viewing with a perfect setting—to rule the evening and attended a screening at the National Film Archive of Japan in their Theatre OZU. I was gratified to discover that one can be on the other side of the world, see a Mizoguchi film in a theater named after Ozu, and still encounter a guy wearing a black graphic tee and headphones.

Roman Porno has been on many minds of late. Just before New York’s Japan Society hosts a retrospective of Nikkatsu’s strongest exports, Tokyo presented three titles for a 55th-anniversary series: Shinji Sōmai’s Love Hotel (subject of a long discussion I hosted last year), Kichitaro Negishi’s Wet Weekend (1979), and Shusuke Kaneko’s Last Cabaret (1988). Roman Porno’s auteur-permissiveness is well encapsulated by this trio: the meanness of Wet Weekend was nicely countervailed by Last Cabaret’s genuine humanism; Last Cabaret’s sentimental sex becomes distorted once seen alongside Wet Weekend’s nasty transactions; and either’s classical form are reconsidered when placed against Sōmai’s bolder, sanity-stretching long takes. Temptations to joke about watching these movies for the mise-en-scène are beside the point, because what distinct mise-en-scène between them all—a mini-history of basic aesthetics and personal form across a less-than-ten-year span.

Sōmai was something of a fixture at this year’s festival, as he should be at any other. Showing alongside Love Hotel were world-premiere restorations of Tokyo Heaven and The Catch, the latter of which I’m disappointed to miss by a distance of 24 hours. The former, however, I saw and (years since looking at a ruddy DVD rip) found reinstated within this major filmmaker’s canon: its vision of threatened adolescence accords with the likes of Moving or Typhoon Club, and most manner of its extended takes jibe with memories of films I’ve not seen in some years. But its fantastical treatment of the afterlife (classic Hollywood backdrops, Obayashi-esque in-camera effects) barely comports with much I could identify in other works’ strenuously earth-bound formalism. I might be more dazzled by Tokyo Heaven‘s mid-film cooking sequence than anything else he ever achieved, and am mostly excited to see it again to figure out if a Texas switch happens in a really concentrated semi-extended image. I believe Cinema Guild will release both of these in North America, adding to their collection of an artist it seems we’re only starting to grasp decades since his death.

I’m Nothing Special Really (Navid Mohammadzadeh)

Both this film’s official synopsis and a conversation with Kenji Ishizaka (who programmed it in Tokyo’s Asian Future section) sought to stress I’m Nothing Special Really as the vision of an unseen Iran: plenty of smoking, drinking, and recognizable socializing with no mention of authoritarian government and zero site of a hijab. Whether one finds this a refreshing break from the common western perception of a large, multivalent nation or somehow irresponsible in light of national turmoil: your call! Knock us out. I can say that, from moment one, I was taken with Mohammadzadeh’s visual-aural-verbal navigations, starting with a house party that mines minor interest from unknown characters until it localizes to a lovers’ dispute and relationship’s demise. Just when I suspected Hong Sangsoo’s influence on the contemporary festival movie had waned, I’m Nothing Special Really makes a major perspective shift that realigns its central sororal relationship, at once fatalistic and tinged with earned optimism. 

The Intertwining (Akira Yamamoto)

Sometimes you just know. Maybe it’s an instigating scenario that, while odd and surprising, isn’t built on shock or seems desperate to capitalize the entirety of one’s attention. Perhaps it’s the next scene’s ultra-intuitive camera movement that balances on two characters’ feelings as much as their physics. Before a tangible premise emerged, I strongly sensed that The Intertwining would mark a total standout, and effectively nothing across 130 minutes challenged this as the best thing I’d see in Tokyo all year. (Only one title below also vies for such position.) I find it profoundly easy to get comfortable with a well-polished Japanese drama—largely static wide shots, defined but ostentation-free color-grading, resounding silences—but it’s another thing to realize nary a shot is misjudged, extraneous, wasted. (To wit: why cut from someone walking down stairs to walking outside when you can capture it all in one pan that places equal emphasis between a character’s movement and the natural soundscape?) I was only delighted by how Yamamoto works with rigid concepts (medium close-ups, shot-reverse) so he can gradually expand his formal playbook up to and including a final shot that pushes its vocabulary yet one further. Yamamoto’s script offers a decent amount of talking, but he mostly wound up recording walking and watching. Is its story convoluted? Sure. So was Asako I & II, and if you accepted there Erika Karata having a more expressive face than just about any working American actress, you’ll also like it here. Speaking of: this has not received one-fraction the attention afforded another 2026 premiere from a former student of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, but (with respect to that fine film and great director) I like The Intertwining—on the basis of its author’s distinct intelligence and sense of their mentor’s specter, which are not synonymous but sure do overlap—better.

The Paper Flower (Chezhiyan)

I entered this, as I do so many films in Tokyo, on the dual basis of basic promise—placement in a strong program, a nice still, something compelling in the brief synopsis—and filling time between a previous movie and that night’s dinner. Even by such standards, The Paper Flower did not get off to a fantastic start. As photographed by writer-director Chezhiyan, this largely shirks itself of opulence, suggesting either an iPhone for image capture or less-treated digital image as final result. Its interiors (a book fair, a character’s lonely apartment) were drab, its general mood depressive. But my doubts were quelled within single-digit minutes by a series of crossfades that split the difference between static and kinetic, expressive and intuitive. Surrounding aesthetic concerns aside, Chezhiyan’s staging is roundly excellent: he can frame two characters in a mobile shot to let their expressions do the speaking, and when they finally do talk it’s staged in a longing manner—always talking about the past, never the future—that brought to mind, superficially or not, Marguerite Duras. I came out of Paper Flower thinking Chezhiyan, who’s directed only one other feature, signals a significant new talent, and was accordingly devastated to learn he passed in July. His film will have to stand as a question mark of what might’ve been.

Saravah (Hironori Kujiraoka)

Hong Sangsoo also looms over Saravah, which (slight time-jump aside) plays less with structure than I’m Nothing Special Really but does one better that film’s interpersonal dynamics. The South Korean’s frequent investigation of life through art and vocation is paralleled by Hironori Kujiraoka’s scenario: two men (Ritsu Otomo, Ōsuke Tokunaga) are tasked with ghostwriting fluffy dramas under a pen name established by an old college friend (Mai Matsumoto), sparking a reunion that unearths longstanding resentments and desires. Anyone at all on its art-vs-artist wavelength will find material to ponder responsibilities inherent to representing another person, of hiding oneself in their work; Saravah, however, is smart to never actually dwell on such questions lest it hinder a relentless accumulation of character detail and variable scenarios. Kujiraoka (who also rather amply edited and co-shot the film) runs the constant risk of over-convolution with adjacent plots and secondary characters, yet instead of intervening they all intersect, complement, underline, and rewatching the first 30 minutes left me duly impressed at how he places so much before us without suggesting much Chekhovian intent. Extra credit for its late-in-the-game title-card drop, a long-dormant trend I was once happy to see gone and found cannily revived for the sake of psychology and structure.

Yamazaki Riverside – Over an Actor’s Shoulder (Isshin Inudo)

Maybe this is a bit of a cheat. Between a festival’s deluge of new films and doing whatever’s possible to retain Tokyo’s atmosphere, I find myself gravitating to the country’s incalculable cinematic heritage, about which we don’t have time or need to get into here. Except to say Over an Actor’s Shoulder does well to locate a sliver of that in Tsutomu Yamazaki, whose credits—High and Low, Kagemusha, Demon Pond, multiple films by Juzo Itami (most notably Tampopo), collaborations with Nobuhiko Obayashi, Takashi Miike, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Shinji Sōmai, Takashi Yamazaki, Kinji Fukasaku, and Yōichi Sai—could serve the syllabus for a pretty good class on post-war Japanese cinema. Isshin Inudo doesn’t exactly break the famous-subject documentary mold by offering film clips, behind-the-scenes stills, and contemporary interviews that capture Yamazaki in his current state. But a 62-year-spanning-cut from a grimly utilitarian, circa-2025 chemotherapy session to his Kurosawa-lensed performance opposite Toshiro Mifune is a nice condensation of life: whatever our achievements, their legacy, and many acquaintances with sublimity, nothing protects us from the inevitable. Still, Yamazaki persists, and final scenes of a cancer-free actor once more plying his craft—discussed by him and numerous figures of Japanese cinema, most notably Ken Watanabe, as a philosophy deserving the utmost respect and seriousness—supply more plain and simple hope than any film I saw at Tokyo this year.

Read the rest of our Tokyo coverage here.

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

BAM
A Dean Stockwell retrospective features films by David Lynch, Joseph Losey, Jonathan Demme, plus Dennis Hopper’s Backtrack on 35mm; Playback offers films by Spike Lee and Gillo Pontecorvo; Ken Russell’s reconstructed The Devils continues—read (or listen to) our interview with Mark Kermode on it.

Museum of the Moving Image
James Gray’s New York features a print of Raging Bull; a Kubrick series continues with A Clockwork Orange and The Killing on 35mm; Lynne Littman’s Testament shows on 35mm this Saturday.

Roxy Cinema
Bill Gunn’s Personal Problems shows on Saturday, while Tickled plays Friday and Sunday.

Museum of Modern Art
A Sergei Loznitsa retrospective continues while Sundays with Steven brings The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and Bridge of Spies.

Film Forum
A 4K restoration of Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern begins playing; The Red Balloon shows on Sunday.

Anthology Film Archives
A German Punk series begins.

IFC Center
Ken Russell’s reconstructed The Devils continues on a restored 35mm print—read (or listen to) our interview with Mark Kermode on it—while The Exorcist, The Holy Mountain, and Ju-On: The Grudge play late.

Nitehawk Prospect Park
A print of JFK screens early on Saturday and Sunday.

Metrograph
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Sad Vacation, and Far from Heaven show on 35mm; Neuro-Noir, Kogonoda: A Way of Looking, and All Happy Families Are Alike start while Terence Fisher, The Leaves are Falling, Trains: Local Routes, and Winona Ryder continue.

While Quentin Tarantino is doing everything possible not to direct his tenth and potentially final film (including prepping the new stage play The Popinjay Cavaliers, a 1830s Europe-set swashbuckling comedy starring Sacha Baron Cohen), his latest contribution to cinema will come via his script for David Fincher’s newly titled The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, a continuation of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood centered on Brad Pitt’s character.

With a two-week IMAX engagement (for which Netflix will actually report the grosses) set for November 25, before debuting on the streaming platform on December 24, there’s a new trailer that finally begins to reveal the contours of Tarantino’s plot, which has been compared (seemingly not-inaccurately) to an Elmore Leonard paperback.

Here’s the very brief synopsis from Netflix: “Brad Pitt returns to his Academy Award-winning role as Cliff Booth, only this time it’s 1977 and it’s a very different Hollywood. Directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, the film also stars Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Peter Weller, Matt Groove, JB Tadena, Corey Fogelmanis, and Karren Karagulian, and will be produced by Pitt and Ceán Chaffin.”

In addition to Pitt and Chaffin, the film’s creative team includes Erik Messerschmidt, ASC, as director of photography, and Donald Graham Burt as production designer. It’s edited by Kirk Baxter, ACE, with casting by Laray Mayfield. Trish Summerville is costume designer, Ren Klyce is sound designer, and Dave Macomber is stunt coordinator.

See the trailer below:

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Bad Apples (Jonatan Entzler)

To international viewers, Bad Apples will play like a conventional dark comedy about a schoolteacher pushed too far by a student; to Brits, it’s a scorched Earth takedown of a state education system that has failed millions of children, any laughs to be had cathartic through the tears. What’s surprising is that such a state-of-the-nation takedown arrives courtesy of Swedish director Jonatan Entzler in his English-language debut, relocating Scandinavian source material to a classroom in the southwest of England. Working with breakthrough screenwriter Jess O’Kane, he’s done an impeccable job encapsulating decades of political failures towards younger generations into a morally slippery kidnapping comedy, weaponizing viewers’ own experiences in the classroom (both as parents and students) to try making you empathize with the criminal adult over their victim. It’s provocative simply because it’s a crowd-pleaser that relies on you abandoning any shred of empathy, highlighting a societal problem by making unsuspecting viewers delight in the worst possible solution to it while revealing unconscious biases. – Alistair R. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Carolina Caroline (Adam Carter Rehmeier)

How do you tell when you stop being good people pretending to be bad and realize you’re just bad people who can’t even trick themselves into thinking they’re anything but? Caroline (Samara Weaving) asks this aloud earlier than you might expect, considering the crime escapade she and new boyfriend Oliver (Kyle Gallner) enjoy commenced at her behest. She didn’t just take his advice and wonder why she’d never left the one place she’s ever known. She didn’t just reject the notion of staying because it’s safe. No, Caroline chose to meet those realities with the decision to become a full-blown outlaw because it made her feel truly alive. – Jared M. (full review)

Where to Stream: Netflix

Do You Love Me (Lana Daher)

In what could’ve also been called Lebanon Plays Itself, Lana Daher’s ambitious, all-archival Do You Love Me captures some 70 years of Lebanese history, curated from a search that began with more than 20,000 potential sources. Consolidated to just 76 minutes, the resulting feat of montage is an experiment as playful as it is informative, showing a country in turmoil and citizens who still find happiness in everyday life. – Jordan R.

Where to Stream: VOD

Drunken Noodles (Lucio Castro)

The laws of time and space are met with frisky ambivalence in Drunken Noodles, Lucio Castro’s anticipated third feature and surely the hottest title in this year’s ACID lineup. Most people familiar with the New York-based, Argentinian-born director first encountered him through End of the Century, a film of similar temporal disregard: set in Barcelona, it followed two men who seemed to fall in love only to realize it wasn’t their first encounter. Upon release in 2019, critics were divided over some of the film’s more adventurous flourishes––the sense of overreach. There are a handful of moments in Noodles that do something similar, but it’s an otherwise sultry and strangely calming film, 82 minutes of late-night hookups and late-season ennui that passes like a summer breeze. – Rory O. (full review)

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

The History of Concrete (John Wilson)

Like a movie tie-in, John Wilson’s debut documentary feature, The History of Concrete, picks up immediately where his HBO series How To with John Wilson left off after three seasons. An elevated public profile does not lead to the next bigger, better project. Instead it’s illustrated via Wilson stumbling upon an empty bag of weed featuring an unauthorized branding of his likeness. The full-sized crew afforded by his show now absent, Wilson is forced back to his roots, filming the day-to-day scenes of New York City life solo. – Caleb H. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Making Marie Antoinette (Eleanor Coppola)

Wrapped inside the visual splendor, luxurious elegance, and ornate decoration of Sofia Coppola’s resplendent and anachronistic Marie Antoinette is the story of a young woman leaving her family behind to help lead another country—an unknown journey and simultaneous document of wealth, excess, and its depressive isolation. Yet despite Coppola tapping into her short filmography’s recurring themes, at least on set, she never contended with the same separation and loneliness of her ill-fated heroine. That’s largely because her mother, Eleanor Coppola, was always by her side—lurking and observing and recording 80 hours of behind-the-scenes footage with her digital camera inside the halls of Versailles. – Jake K-S. (full review)

Where to Stream: MUBI

Musk (Alex Gibney)

A dense, probing, ultimately terrifying exploration of the world’s richest man, Alex Gibney’s four-hour opus Musk isn’t going to reveal anything new about the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX that you couldn’t glean from the myriad books, podcasts, and articles. There’s no smoking gun to explain his laser-like focus on domination or even his intense rightward political shift in recent years. Yet in sweeping across Musk’s life since about 1995—when he founded his first company, Zip2—Gibney nevertheless paints a damning picture in its totality and simplicity. That’s because for all his talk of AI, self-driving cars, and colonizing Mars, Elon Musk is a frighteningly simple person to decipher. The illusion of wealth, status, and brilliance that he carried through the 1990s finally gave way to actual wealth and status by hustling and grifting his way into a succession of companies that were already marginally successful. – Christian G. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Nicolas Cage

One of the most iconic cinematic presences is getting a well-deserved spotlight on the Criterion Channel this month, featuring Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Rumble Fish, Valley Girl, Birdy, Peggy Sue Got Married, Moonstruck, Raising Arizona, Vampire’s Kiss, Wild at Heart, Leaving Las Vegas, City of Angels, Snake Eyes, Bringing Out the Dead, Adaptation, Matchstick Men, The Wicker Man, and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

Possible Love (Lee Chang-dong)

In a year of unknown quantities at the Venice Film Festival, Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love has delivered the triumph for which fans of the elusive director had been hoping. Lee’s first feature since Burning, a modern masterpiece that blew away the competition in Cannes eight years ago, is another novelistic gem, the kind of richly detailed and intricately scripted yarn in which alluring themes like class, sex, and sociology are always on the table to be picked at. It also bears a much-wider and more-specific political purview than its predecessor, which comes at a cost for its dramatic pull from time to time. Lee’s nevertheless returned with the most substantial film I’ve seen in this year’s competition and one that is easily amongst the best of the year so far. – Rory O. (full review)

Where to Stream: Netflix (Note: Netflix has also added most of Lee’s other films, including his 2022 short Heartbeat, available online for the first time ever)

Primetime (Lance Oppenheim)

Robert Pattinson was born to play Chris Hansen. In the opening shot of Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime—the documentary savant’s first foray into fiction, this one based on a true story—we immediately see the popular To Catch a Predator host as the menace Oppenheim and first-time screenwriter Ajon Singh want us to understand him as. He’s cast in a devilish red light, swallowed by shadow, displayed through an eerie mini-DV grain, and reciting the lines “I will undress you and you will undress me” over and over in Hansen’s trademark brassy, rehearsed, does-he-really-sound-like-that (yes, he does) tone. The chilling music of the haunted fairytale score glitches in and out while children’s-show chimes ring ominously.  – Luke H. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Resident Evil (Zach Cregger)

Resident Evil, as a game series, has always borrowed heavily from cinema, whether it be the fixed angles and Kiyoshi Kurosawa inspirations of the first title to the Texas Chainsaw riffs in the 7th. It’s less about the zombies, more the feeling of powerlessness and weird puzzles. Zach Cregger understands this on a deep level. His follow-up to Weapons may not be a pitch-perfect adaptation of the long-running lore, but it perfectly captures the spirit of Resident Evil as a whole, not to mention what it’s like to play it. The perfect title might actually have been Biohazard. – Devan S. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Sense and Sensibility (Georgia Oakley)

It’s always tempting to discuss Jane Austen adaptations in comparison with their predecessors, especially when the most famous example here is Ang Lee’s version that earned Emma Thompson her second Oscar. Georgia Oakley recognizes this; rather than trying to reinvent the wheel or subvert this text, she instead delivers a sublime take that more than justifies returning to the well once more. For as much as we desire original stories, there’s just as much pleasure to be taken from a solid translation of sturdy material. And it confirms the Blue Jean director as a major talent—a great eye who can put a definite stamp on outside sources without going overboard. – Devan S. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (Bassam Tariq)

Latif (Mahershala Ali) is a righteous man. A religious man. He sees himself in a holy war to cleanse the world of his people’s enemies by picking up where the law ends. Those who know about his work justifiably condemn it, whether that be his Imam (Giancarlo Esposito’s Abdul Malik) or his wife. They don’t, however, condemn him. Because they understand his struggle. They know his pain. Why add to it? So, they grant him mercy instead. They accept him and hope he will one day find his way back. – Jared M. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Also New to Streaming

The Criterion Channel

About Endlessness
Being John Malkovich
Belly
CB4
The Cell
CQ
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
Guncrazy
Happy Hour
Home of the Brave
Human Nature
Labyrinthe
The Last Waltz
Laura
Leave Her to Heaven
Manal Issa, 2024
Maria Schneider, 1983
Never Let Me Go
Night and the City
No Picnic
One Hour Photo
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
The Replacement Killers
The Secret of the Grain
Se7en
Sexy Beast
Shades of Silk
A Swedish Love Story
This Is Spinal Tap
Thumbsucker
Trainspotting
Two Gods
Way of a Gaucho
Where the Sidewalk Ends
You, the Living

Hulu

Super Troopers 3

Kino Film Collection

Careful

Peacock

The Uprising

He may not be a household name when it comes to the world of jazz, but the influence of Marcus Belgrave is felt far and wide, playing with Ray Charles, Charles Mingus, the Funk Brothers, and more. His life story now gets the documentary treatment with …And Damn He Could Play: The Marcus Belgrave Story, directed by Timashion Jones and featuring narration from Wendell Pierce. Ahead of its DOC NYC world premiere on November 13, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the first trailer and poster.

The documentary features quite the lineup of appearances, including Wynton Marsalis, Don Was, Terence Blanchard, Bert Daring, Bill Meyer, Carl Craig, Charlie Gabriel, Chris Collins, Christopher Smith, Daphne Nitiri, David Ritz, Duke Fakir, Dwight Adams, Endea Owens, Eudora Muhammad, Gayelynn McKinney, Herb Boyd, James Carter, Joan Belgrave, Kasan Belgrave, Karriem Riggins, Mable John, Marion Hayden, Nicholas Peyton, Paul Riser, Ray Parker Jr., Regina Carter, Robert Hurst, Sheila Jordan, Theo Croker, Tonya Hood, and Wendell Harrison.

Here’s the synopsis: “A jazz legend you likely haven’t heard of, trumpet player Marcus Belgrave’s influence has reverberated far beyond the spotlight. Making his professional debut at the age of 12, Belgrave went on to perform and record with the likes of Ray Charles, Charles Mingus, and Motown’s legendary Funk Brothers. Mentored by trumpet icon Clifford Brown, Belgrave in turn became a guiding force for generations of musicians through his work as an educator and mentor, championing Detroit’s artistic soul, and involvement in the groundbreaking arts collective Tribe. His reach can be heard in the artistry of jazz luminaries including Geri Allen, Kenny Garrett, James Carter, Regina Carter, Theo Croker, and Endea Owens, among many others. Though too often overlooked in the broader story of jazz, Belgrave’s legacy lives on in the musicians he inspired, the Detroit scene he helped cultivate, and the music that continues to swing, soar, and speak through generations.”

“As a filmmaker from Detroit, I have always been drawn to stories that show the power of reaching and teaching the next generation. The children are our future, and it is only right that we pour into them and pass the baton so they can run and lead us forward. That is exactly what Marcus did through his music and mentorship,” said director Timashion Jones. “This documentary is my way of honoring that spirit and showing the world how one man could be a shattered diamond who shared his light and love for music with people all across the world. His story reminds us that when you invest in others, your legacy continues to play long after your final note.”

See the exclusive trailer and poster premiere below.

There is nary a time and place without financial concerns, but it’s well within the needs of any public-facing institution to maintain the image of strong, steady organization. Takeo Hisamatsu was appointed director of the Tokyo International Film Festival in April, resuming a title he held from 2017 to 2021 while inheriting some massive responsibilities for his nation’s cinema. As UniJapan’s vice president and former decision-maker at Warner Bros. Japan and Shochiku, he seems to appreciate the ever-evolving and never-quite-at-rest. Speaking to myself and four other journalists in Ginza’s posh Midtown Hibiya, Hisamatsu was extremely straight-faced about the challenges facing TIFF at a time when basic questions of authorship and autonomy—a question of basic humanity—are plaguing the film industry. Safe to say there is always the need for more money, and TIFF is staring down a 40th edition they hope to make a bigger-than-usual celebration. 

To his credit, the 39th year maintains a strong surface, continuing TIFF’s habit of housing numerous films that are either world-premiering or have yet to make a significant dent since debuts at other, larger gatherings. In three years’ attendance I’ve especially appreciated their emphasis on Asian (particularly Japanese) features less-than-likely to receive any stateside play. It’s consistent with Hisamatsu’s desire to see more institutional support for local cinema, but a somewhat tricky line to tread when recent competition winners come from outside—our conversation was days before the top prize went to Sister Brother Manhole Cover, a film that boasts six countries in its credits, none Japanese—and programs like Asian Future make a point of defining “Asian cinema” more broadly than Japan, Korea, China, and Hong Kong. I asked Hisamatsu for his wider thoughts on the matter, to which he responded:

“Given the current circumstances for international film festivals, it’s important to take a path between introducing foreign films to Japanese moviegoers [and] at the same time, that Japanese films to be [brought] to overseas movie fans. So we need to have both. But in terms of the balance, I look to put more emphasis on introducing Japanese films, or filmmakers, to the world. Because we are part of the film industry. I’m surprised that, this year, some international film festivals, they screen a lot of, you know, Korean films. They say ‘we are global,’ but you know, if we do the same thing—competing against Cannes or Berlin or Venice—I don’t think that’s the right way we should go. So as we are in this country—the culture, the people, the filmmakers—I think it’s obvious, or it’s natural, to put more emphasis on your own country’s films and filmmakers to introduce to the world. That’s how I think.”

Still, the money. While one can look at TIFF’s impressive list of sponsors—a globalized consortium boasting Rolex (which has made a massive push in recent years to support Sundance, NYFF, TIFF), likewise-major entities (Coca-Cola, Capcom, Bandai Namco, Morgan Stanley), and more regional groups—and grasp a job well done, Hisamatsu tells us nothing is guaranteed (or easy to plan) when government funds change every year. His preference: a certain amount is promised for at least two or three years à la athlete contracts. Which is not even accounting for more or less nothing getting cheaper nowadays (he noted airline tickets as a particular culprit) and few with wallets to open factoring art-in-hard-times bromides when deciding where to actually put the cash. (As one who appreciates round-trip flights to Tokyo and chance to witness something at least a bit unique in the increasingly homogenized film scene, I know where my hopes lie.) Hisamatsu was also insistent that film festivals aren’t festive enough. Where music festivals fulfill the concept of a large gathering by degrees and in, multiple senses, volume, why, he asks, can’t there be a balance between the serious act of watching movies in dark, quiet rooms and celebrating said movies and their makers in the immediate vicinity? The thinking has me hopeful for next year’s 40th-anniversary edition, about which during my week in Ginza I heard more than one intimation of aims for a bigger-than-usual celebration of Japanese cinema’s expansive history.

It’s fair to surmise that some greater sense of community would aid these efforts. To wit, Hisamatsu boasted of a party he’d host that evening for numerous Japanese filmmakers—on the one hand a social gathering natural to the festival environment and on the other his hope to ameliorate a lack of proper socializing in local film circles. This sparked my curiosity as to what most concerns local directors at a time when—here as elsewhere—money and AI hang like a black cloud. I did not expect the answer to be “English education,” but as he elaborated:

“Honestly. You know, in this country, English class starts from [3rd grade]. I spent three years, in high school three years, and in college four years. So: ten years we learned English. Still, we still can’t speak English. That’s a problem. We have to change our education system. And English is the key. Fortunately for you—unfortunately for us—we have to spend more time to learn English. Maybe more words or something. It’s a handicap for us. But, you know, to communicate with other people in this given world, whether you like it or not, you have to speak English, right? And if you can speak English, you can communicate with more people around the world. European people, they speak English very well—like French people, Dutch people. The English alphabet may be much closer than us. For them, probably, it’s easier to speak English than us. So you can communicate in English easily. But for us, that’s like a handicap. But don’t complain; do something. Right?”

As Kenji Ishizaka told me just a day prior and Academy CEO Bill Kramer elaborated in his own TIFF panel, the windows between eastern and western industries are closing, while no less a figure than Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Ryusuke Hamaguchi told me that recent expeditions in France could be their stepping stone to an American debut. I don’t expect either to become fluent in English—one more readily imagines producers surrounding them with expert interpreters, even actors (à la Virginie Efira) learning for themselves—but I see the overlap. American cinema simply doesn’t have enough good filmmakers that it can afford to let the opportunity for cross-hemisphere exchange fall through the cracks. Should it come to pass sometime soon, support from the Tokyo International Film Festival and Hisamatsu will likely become part of that history.

Read the rest of our Tokyo coverage here.

Looking for what to see in theaters? Our feature, updated weekly, highlights our top recommendations for films currently in theaters, from new releases to restorations receiving a proper theatrical run.

While we already provide extensive monthly new-release recommendations and weekly streaming recommendations, as distributors’ roll-outs can vary, this is a one-stop list to share the essential films that may be on a screen near you.

La Bola Negra (Los Javis)

If 19th- and 20th-century storytelling was defined by grandiose literature, the 21st is all about cinema. We read less and watch more; consequently, films have become a substitute for sweeping stories that weave various timelines and protagonists. The latest in such regard is Cannes revelation La Bola Negra (aka The Black Ball), a truly ambitious project—inspired by historical truth while remaining a fictional, highly personal undertaking. – Jan T. (full review)

Everytime (Sandra Wollner)

In Everytime, a sun-dappled film about death and love that might be the best in Cannes this year, the terrible loss of a teenage girl’s life leaves her mother, younger sister, and boyfriend bound in mutual devastation. Set in present-day East Berlin during the balmy months of the year, this is a film that appears at first to be drawn from the same Berlin School approach as Christian Petzold and Angela Schanelec, but there’s little of that cohort’s minimalism or literary melancholy here. No need to know that the DP is Gregory Oke for one’s mind to gradually wander to Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun—another movie about how the worst things still manage to happen regardless of the weather. – Rory O. (full review)

Fatherland (Paweł Pawlikowski)

Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize-winning writer and voice of the German resistance from abroad, fled Germany in 1933 to take refuge in California, where he lived for sixteen years before returning to Germany in 1949 to receive the Goethe Prize in Frankfurt, show face, and embrace the flattery of his snowballing celebrity. That’s where we enter Polish writer-director (and for the first time, editor) Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, a film that traces Mann’s (Hanns Zischler) widely publicized but brief return to his homeland under the guidance of his brilliant, staid daughter and translator Erika (Sandra Hüller). – Luke H. (full review)

Godzilla Minus Zero (Takashi Yamazaki)

Blockbuster films in America often have faceless, nameless enemies. Villainous, fictional countries attempt to rule the world, steal nuclear codes, or set off a bioweapon, only to be taken down by one of our aging Hollywood stars. Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus Zero, the director’s sequel to 2023’s acclaimed Godzilla Minus One, takes a different approach. Its villains range from the American military (and government) to the kaiju Ghidorah, both of which are destructive. The geopolitical underpinnings of the film work as a reminder of what war causes and continues to cause. But it’s still a Godzilla movie, and Yamazaki scales up the action to blaring, symphonic proportions. – Michael F. (full review)

Club Kid (Jordan Firstman)

It’s never wise to assume anything. Promotional materials doing the rounds before Club Kid‘s raucous Cannes premiere this week suggested a New York downtown scene answer to Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, but Jordan Firstman’s funny, bittersweet, and tremendously moving directorial debut is as much a fresh reimagining of the stunted father subgenre that gave us everything from Kramer vs Kramer and Marriage Story to Adam Sandler’s Big Daddy. This is a movie that promises and delivers scenes of copious drug taking and gross-out comedy, but its third-act emotional payoff is as earned and devastating as the best of them. – Rory O. (full review)

Mouse (Alex Thompson, Kelly O’Sullivan)

It’s the last day of junior high for Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) and her best friend Callie (Chloe Coleman); the veil of adulthood has never felt as thin as it does on that late-June morning in the car, blasting Michelle Branch’s 2002 pop hit “All You Wanted.” Branch belts “If you want to, I can save you//I can take you away from here” from the amped-up speakers as the two girls get ready to take on the world, or at least the day. This beautiful, unlikely friendship is at the heart of Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s Mouse, a coming-of-age drama with the lightest touch premiering in Berlinale’s Panorama section. – Savina P. (full review)

NAZA (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor)

In a sobering wake-up call to anyone somehow not paying attention to the genocide Israel is enacting, as well as the most essential documentary of the year, No Other Land directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor have returned with NAZA. Luke Hicks said in his review, “Very, very few films, no matter how great or important, are actually urgent. You’ll get around to it eventually; it’ll be stuck in time waiting for you. But NAZA is urgent, an essential film, a living document in conversation with the most pressing issue in the world right now. And it’s the new foremost authority on what’s happening on a granular, behind-the-scenes level in Israel’s crusade against Gaza. It’s much harder to question or deny a genocide that’s happening when the people perpetrating it in real time call it genocide themselves.”

Once Upon a Time in Harlem (William and David Greaves)

Picture this: it’s an overcast day in August 1972. You’re at a cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s townhouse in Harlem. As you awkwardly hold your glass of punch, you’re drowned in cacophonous conversation about art, politics, and society during one of the most vibrant intellectual and creative movements of the modern era. This is the experience of William and David Greaves’ Once Upon a Time in Harlem, an immersive and masterfully rendered documentary that presents a living, breathing oral history of the Harlem Renaissance. Watching it feels like unearthing treasure. – Kent M. W. (full review)

One in a Million (Jack MacInnes and Itab Azzam)

“War is not the hardest thing a person can go through. It’s not as hard as what comes after.” These opening words are the guiding theme of Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes’ One in a Million, an epic saga of exile and assimilation centered on Israa and her family, Syrian refugees who flee their perilous, war-torn homeland to restart life in Germany. Filmed over a decade, the family story also doubles as a coming-of-age tale where both the joy of freedom and tumult of assimilation test every family member’s bonds. While the film’s episodic structure and, considering its sprawling canvas, relatively succinct runtime leave some details less explored, the filmmakers capture, with moving sensitivity, how perceived liberty doesn’t always mean true independence. – Jordan R. (full review)

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (Noah Segan)

The thing about New York City is: it’s never as good as it was, yet it’s still better than anywhere else. The only thing constant is change, and the city is a paragon of that fact. There’s a dwindling number of remnants from the times when it was novel, dangerous, and vibrant. One of those relics is pickpocket Harry Lehman (John Turturro) in writer-director Noah Segan’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. – Kent M. W. (full review)

Possible Love (Lee Chang-dong)

In a year of unknown quantities at the Venice Film Festival, Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love has delivered the triumph for which fans of the elusive director had been hoping. Lee’s first feature since Burning, a modern masterpiece that blew away the competition in Cannes eight years ago, is another novelistic gem, the kind of richly detailed and intricately scripted yarn in which alluring themes like class, sex, and sociology are always on the table to be picked at. It also bears a much-wider and more-specific political purview than its predecessor, which comes at a cost for its dramatic pull from time to time. Lee’s nevertheless returned with the most substantial film I’ve seen in this year’s competition and one that is easily amongst the best of the year so far. – Rory O. (full review)

Queen at Sea (Lance Hammer)

Eleven years ago, Tom Courtenay arrived at the Berlinale with Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years, an exquisitely observed study of emotional dilemma in which the British actor played a doddery romantic whose selfish tendencies threatened to get the better of him. He returns to the German festival with a performance of similar weight and resonance in Lance Hammer’s Queen at Sea, a film that centers on an even more challenging moral dilemma—albeit with results that are slightly less delightfully ambiguous than those Haigh managed in 2015. – Rory O. (full review)

Wicker (Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson)

The jealousy of unhappy couples. The pettiness of mean girls. The frustration of insecure husbands. It’s a tale as old as time that’s curiously interpreted by writer-directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer in Wicker, an audacious, captivating film about an outcast woman, her wood-woven husband, and the village that collapses over their love. – Kent M. W. (full review)

Wild Horse Nine (Martin McDonagh)

The trailer for Wild Horse Nine looks like nothing more than a parody of Martin McDonagh’s well-established and celebrated style. “How many times did the line about killing a guy in/spelling Czechoslovakia have to play during World Cup hydration breaks before you lost it?” is the new “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?” Yet no matter how much confidence the trailers instilled in its potential tedium, Wild Horse Nine is anything but derivative, tedious, kitschy, unfunny, or phoned-in. It is, in a way, exactly what you’re expecting, exactly what’s advertised. But as always, McDonagh delivers as effectively as ever, proving that fame and filmmaking success haven’t diluted his artistry at all. – Luke H. (full review)

Wildwood (Travis Knight)

Because of Coraline, LAIKA’s first effort as a studio and still its best-known, there’s an expectation that each subsequent project will fit comfortably within the horror realm, each new release a rite of passage for thousands of kids previously unaware that movies could give them nightmares. This will inevitably be the same case with Wildwood, director Travis Knight’s lavish and ambitious adaptation of the 2011 YA novel by Decemberists lead singer Colin Meloy, not least because it cold-opens with a young boy committing suicide, ripping out his insides to reveal he was an automaton operated by cogs. The gothic imagery hardly subsides from there, with Knight soon recreating the haunting image from Hitchcock’s The Birds, a murder of crows swarming over a playground ready to feast on unsuspecting children. – Alistair R. (full review)

You Can See Everything (Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim)

Capping off an astounding season for documentaries, another one that will go down in the annals of non-fiction history is Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s jaw-dropping, enigmatic character(s) study You Can See Everything. What begins as a stranger-than-fiction scenario in which a small crew, including the directors, were invited to the home of Elizabeth Holmes mere weeks before she began her prison sentence evolves into a thoroughly riveting study of the thin line between fact and fiction, public versus private personas, and perverse family dynamics hitherto never quite captured on screen before. Read Nick Newman’s review.

More Films Now Playing in Theaters

• Being Heumann
• Digger
• I Play Rocky
• Nuisance Bear
• Paradise Lost
• Soul Patrol
• Zi

Read all reviews here. For our NYC-specific repertory round-ups, including many films that will tour the country, bookmark NYC Weekend Watch.