A pleasant Rocky-like dance-narrative, yet Nakamoto struggles to develop his promising concept into an emotionally satisfying experience.
Category: Festivals
You Are The Film (2026) review [Fantasia Film Festival]
Makoto Ueda proves that cinema is alive and kicking.
Fiamma (2025) review [Nippon Connection 2026]
With brutal elegance, Uchida develops the idea that physical reality cannot be equated with subjective truth.
Night Flower (2025) review [Nippon Connection 2026]
Eiji Uchida delivers a highly moving drama of motherhood.
SAI: Disaster (2025) review [Nippon Connection 2026]
Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirase deliver an experience that, in our view, has everything to become a cult-phenomenon, so do not sleep on it.
Fantasia International Film Fest: Japanese Films not to miss.
Find out our recommendations of this year’s Fantasia Film Festival.
Ando (2025) review [Nippon Connection 2026]
Arai might be the fresh blood that the thriller genre thirsts for in Japan. However, only time will tell.
Tokyo Taxi (2025) review [Nippon Connection 2026]
Yoji Yamada delivers an incredibly touching experience – possibly his swangsong – for cinephiles to savour.
A Unique Country In Asia (2025) review [Nippon Connection 2026]
A film that fully embraces the political dimension pink film once was known for.
Long Night (2025) review [Nippon Connection 2026]
A self-assured debut, wielding the filmic frame to stage the alienation of the contemporary subject, the failure of imaginary fictions, and the disruptive effect of avoiding Otherness,
The Deepest Space In Us (2025) [Nippon Connection 2026]
Chikuma utilizes his atmospheric blend of intimacy and alienation to assert that the societal field will always fail the Otherness of its subjects and, more importantly, that the deepest space in us is something that continually escapes us.
Blue Boy Trail (2025) review [Nippon Connection 2026]
Kasho Iizuka delivers a heartfelt demand to the spectator to go beyond the mere societal and ideological question of gender and consider the right of the subject to carve out his own singular space of ego-contentment.
Anymart (2026) review [Nippon Connection 2026]
A darkly twisted comical horror narrative that exposes the dynamic of repressive societal violence and what the Japanese societal field seeks to refuse.
Recommendations: Nippon Connection 2026
Do not miss any of these films at this year’s Nippon Connection.
Confetti (2023) review
A pleasant film that underlines, in an elegant and touching manner, the necessity for the subject to find an Other to commit himself to his dream, to his desire.