Last Night in Taipei (明日的過客, Kuo Cheng-chui, 2025)

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Three old friends who haven’t seen each other in years are forced to confront the reality of their lives after a chance encounter in Kuo Cheng-chui’s Last Night in Taipei (明日的過客, míngrì dì guòkè). Less an odyssey through the midnight city, the film is really more about finding accommodation with a sense of middle-aged regret and letting go of what might have been, though it does not necessarily seem that any of them are really happier after dealing with their unresolved feelings.

Blanche’s marriage has begun to turn cold owing to her husband’s deference to his mother who is upset that they have yet to conceive a child and continually dropping off Chinese medicine to help them along. After arguing with her husband Ben when a date night is abruptly cancelled she decides to stay in the city alone where she immediately runs into an ex, Jake, who is on a trip home from Paris where he as lived for the last few years. To begin with, it isn’t quite clear whether Blanche has actually met him at all or is just fantasising about what her life would be like if she’d stayed with him rather than ending up Ben whose chief advantage seems to be his wealth.

But Jake is similarly feeling lost in that he feels out of place in both Paris and Taipei and is perceived as a foreigner in both places. Meanwhile, he’s harbouring unresolved feelings about the end of his relationship with Blanche. While wandering though the city, the pair walk into a bar where their old friend Axin is currently working. His current girlfriend, Mao Mao, later joins them, but their relationship is not all it seems as Mao Mao essentially hired Axin to play the part of her boyfriend for 99 days to make an ex jealous and is now having difficulty dealing with the end of the arrangement.

The trio met when they were all aspiring actors, and they have to one extent or another each failed to fulfil their dreams. Only Axin is seriously persevering with performing, but he to is coming to the conclusion that he has failed as an actor and it’s time for him to leave Taipei. Blanche, too, regrets not having had the opportunity to play a proper role and is feeling unsatisfied with her married life. She wonders if this is all there really is and her entire life is already decided. Perhaps she only stays with Ben because it’s become convenient while the risks of leaving outweigh the benefits. Jake too always felt as if Taiwan was a liminal space, not somewhere he’d stay indefinitely, so he never put down roots. He reflects how much the city has changed, almost if it did so deliberately to give them memories as these spaces seem to retreat from them back into the past. 

The frequent references to missiles and intrusions into their airspace echo this sense of restless anxiety that this current existence might soon disappear or be taken from them. The sense of impending doom forces the three friends to reassess their bonds and missed connections providing an opportunity for at least partial emotional honesty even if these unresolved feelings are not fully addressed. Mao Mao too must reevaluate what she was looking for in her relationship with Axin in which he too was perhaps merely putting off the act of confronting himself and his life.

Though they may each discover a way of moving forward, no one seems all that happy about it. Blanche considers leaving her marriage, but ultimately stays perhaps because she lacks the courage to actually do it and resigns herself to an unfulfilling future. Jake still feels adrift and blames himself for the failure of his relationship with Blanche, realising that he let her down out of fear and immaturity. Axin too decides to move on, but is left with a sense of regret, while Mao Mao too can only resolve to start over again from day one. In some ways the friendship between them might have been repaired with the air cleared, but on the other hand as Axin says real friends don’t necessarily need to be in contact all the time and each seems to be left a little lonelier even than before in having closed a door to the past with seemingly none to open to the future.

Last Night in Taipei screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (dialogue free)

Break Free (オドレ！ヤクザ, Yu Nakamoto, 2026) [Fantasia 2026]

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The yakuza as an institution has long been on the decline in Japan, if not on the brink of extinction, thanks to the various anti-organised crime laws that have come into play over the last few decades. The laws are so stringent that members of the yakuza are unable to open bank accounts, rent property, or even take out a mobile phone contract, making their daily lives almost impossible. Meanwhile, dwindling manpower and changing times have meant that the yakuza cannot make a living from its traditional lines of business and has to look for other ways to earn its keep.

It’s this very problem that’s plaguing the heroes of Yu Nakamoto’s warmhearted comedy Break Free (オドレ！ヤクザ, Odore! Yakuza!) who are all doing various other unsatisfying jobs such as working as takeaway delivery drivers, shopping mall mascots, or running low level romance scams online which seems like a more innocent nod to the reality that the actual yakuza’s main new line of business is scamming the elderly and vulnerable. Then again, most of them are really a little young to have joined the yakuza in its heyday and the film really takes place within the context of more recent straight-to-video yakuza movies. Though it makes frequent nods to the darker side of yakuza life, often for comic effect such as the silhouette of Kunio’s (Akio Fujii) colleague Yama (Shigeo Osako) beating a guy with a baseball bat appearing behind him as he shoots a dance video, our heroes are mainly good guys and hapless fools whose problem is that they can’t let go of their old lives nor can they adapt to the modern society.

The inability to get a legitimate phone is perhaps one reason why 38-year-old Kunio is completely unaware of social media and apps like “TikTak” that are dominated by dance videos. Another thing that yakuza really can’t do any more is harm a member of the public, which is why one slimy guy in a suit thinks it’s a good idea to try and show off to his girlfriend by taunting a yakuza knowing he can’t do anything to him. But Kunio unexpectedly fights back through the medium of improvisational street dance and goes viral for his pains. The clan begin to spot a new, less problematic line of business, but the plan is once again complicated by the fact that yakuza are technically banned from having accounts on those kinds of services as well appearing on television. Kunio, while still a yakuza, has to cosplay as one by pretending that the yakuza thing is just a gimmick to give his dance videos more of an edge. 

Deciding to hone his skills, he ends up in a dance class surrounded by little kids and run by a woman who used to be a backup dancer, but decided she liked teaching more and opened a school. In a way, this echoes Kunio’s journey. Marie’s decision to quit being a backup dancer wasn’t a moment of defeat but its opposite as she actively chose the kind of life she thought would suit her better. Kunio’s friend has already left the yakuza because he wanted to get married but didn’t want his girlfriend to become a gangster’s wife. He is still subject to some of the restrictions placed on yakuza so his life isn’t easy, but he makes a good living with his yakiniku restaurant and is very happy in his marriage. 

The pun of the English-language title refers to Kunio’s efforts to “break free” of the moribund yakuza world through the power of break dancing which not only reconnects him with the unfulfilled desires of his late brother but offers him a path to discovering his true self as he realises that in dance he’s finally found something he actually wants to do. Thanks to an unexpectedly supportive new community around him from Marie at the dance school to a pint-sized aspiring idol and veteran influencer Ririko, Kunio begins to see new possibilities for the future, but the yakuza proves harder to escape than one might first expect. Whether he can ever really “break free” remains to be seen, but even while otherwise imprisoned, dance can be liberating. Trading heavily on the incongruities of its concept, the film is nevertheless warmhearted and sympathetic of its gangster heroes who find themselves cast adrift in a world that no longer has much place for them.

Break Free screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

White Flowers and Fruits (白の花実, Yukari Sakamoto, 2025)

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The abrupt suicide of a young woman at a protestant Christian boarding school causes those around her to reassess their reality in Yukari Sakamoto’s poetic drama White Flowers and Fruits (白の花実, Shiro no Kajitsu). Perhaps done a disservice by the literalness of its English language title, the film is on one level as the Japanese title implies about the disconnect between form and content, or the extent to which we project ourselves onto others and see only what we want or expect to see.

Anna (Miro) is someone who says she can see “what others can’t”. This most obviously refers to her ability to see ghosts, though of course we can’t be sure whether she is telling the truth or hallucinating reflections of her own anxieties. In any case, she has a rebellious streak which is why her mother has transferred her to a Christian boarding school. “It’s your last chance,” she tells her, implying that Anna has already been expelled from several other institutions for her refusal to conform. Anna, however, promptly discovers an angry ghost hovering directly behind her new roommate Rika (Nico Aoto) and thereafter refuses to the “pointless” rules of the school including wearing her ribbon necktie.

She and “lovely” Rika are then contrasted as model student and its reverse. It’s Rika who remarks that being at odds with everyone all the time must be exhausting and her life might be easier if she made more of an effort to get along with people, but Anna claims that she is simply unlike Rika and this is something she is unable to do even if she wanted to. “Why don’t you try being me?” Rika asks after putting her own ribbon around Anna’s neck, as if she were lifting a burden from herself and placing it onto Anna in a moment of forced conformity if also a well-meaning rather than oppressive gesture. When Rika takes her own life by jumping from the bell tower not long after, it provokes a degree of soul-searching among everyone at the school but most especially Anna and Rika’s best friend Shiori (Anji Ikehata).

After reading Rika’s diary, Anna begins seeing a blue orb she believes to be Rika’s spirit which eventually settles in her chest and begins to alter her personality to become a little more malleable and conformist as expressed by the Edwardian-style high collars of her uniform and newly deferent personality. It’s never quite clear if this is “real”, Anna’s delusion, a manifestation of her attempt to come to terms with grief, or deliberate subterfuge as she begins to develop a friendship with Shiori in part based on the notion that she has been possessed by Rika. The pair are both trying in one sense to get a handle on the sides of Rika that they didn’t have access to in order to understand why she died. 

But Rika’s diary is full of insecurity. She feels herself under pressure training to train for the school’s traditional dance show and is paranoid that she makes those around her worry when she doesn’t perform well enough. The dance itself is strangely sensual and witchy, earthy and rooted in nature in contrast to the religious setting of the school. On reading the diary, Shiori realises that shortly before she died Rika tried to confess her feelings for her, but Shiori simply didn’t understand and worries this accidental and insensitive rejection may have contributed to her desire to take her own life. It is not especially the religiosity of the school that is repressive, however, so much so as the enforced conformity of their social class. 

Aside from their association with “Class S” lesbian romance literature, these kinds of boarding schools are associated most closely with upper-class women who are being trained to become wives of important men. As such it is important that they learn to be, unlike Anna, meek and obedient. On a return home, Shiori attends a dinner party at which only her sister is dressed in red and seated across from a man to whom she has evidently been betrothed for an arranged marriage. Shiori is mildly horrified, but her sister just seems to stare on vacantly as if resigned to her fate. But it’s also this image of properness that may have prevented Rika getting the help she needed before she died as her animosity towards her family and fear of her father were ignored because of their social standing. Rika’s apparently distraught father is determined to retrieve the diary presumably because he fears what might be written inside it. Rika’s role as a model student might then have been a persona that marked her attachment to alternate familial home and a desire to escape sexual abuse at the hands of her father.

A video is leaked showing a young girl smoking in one of the school’s bedrooms with many believing it to be Rika, though it isn’t really clear who is it just as it is often unclear whether Anna is Rika or a version of herself. A final moment of rebellion, Anna challenges the enquiry into Rika’s death accusing them of using Rika’s death for their own ends to explore questions about themselves rather than directly confronting their own realities, though perhaps this is what she too has been doing. In an ironic way, it’s through letting Rika go that Anna and Shiori are able to move forward with their lives, but in other ways they take her with them as if she really had settled somewhere in Anna’s chest. Anna has learned how to dance for herself and come to some kind of accommodation with the world, while Shiori has been presented with a picture of herself that is also a picture of Rika in its reflected gaze. Sakamoto leans into J-horror territory in capturing the gothic atmosphere of the school, though as Anna later says, the ghosts themselves are not really frightening so much as an expression of that which remains unknown an acceptance of which defines adult enlightenment.

White Flowers and Fruits screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Funky Freaky Freaks (충충충, Han Chang-lok, 2025)

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The gentle balance between three outsiders is disrupted by an elite transfer student in Han Chang-lok’s stylish drama Funky Freaky Freaks (충충충, Chungchungchung). Divided into three chapters, Impulse, Collision, and Shock, the film is, in many ways, a slow motion car crash or a path towards an inevitably destructive conclusion as the hero finds himself cast further out and abandoned by those close to him while his dream of becoming a superhero and saving the world by saving the woman he loves drifts further and further away.

Yong-ki (Joo Min-hyeong) doesn’t have many friends at school and is a fairly non-descript presence. He spends most of his time with two friends who, like him, are cast out of the mainstream and battling a sense of powerlessness. Ji-sook (Baek Ji-hye) is a survivor of domestic violence and has developed body dysmorphia that has left her with an eating disorder. She sells used underwear to men with fetishes in order to buy weight-loss drugs and seems to be considered the weird girl at school. Dumbo (Shin Jun-hang), meanwhile, is bullied for two different reasons. The first being that he is simply chubby. The second is however that he is gay and effeminate. He puts on a woman’s voice and chats to men on the internet, often conning them into buying him dinner before, perhaps unwisely, reverting to a more masculine voice to humiliate the person he’s been calling. 

Everything changes for each of them when a new transfer student arrives at the school. Woo-ju (Jeong Soo-hyun) is said to be from a wealthy and prominent family and a candidate for the national Olympic judo team. Of course, it’s a little odd for someone like him to transfer to Yong-ki’s school which is in a fairly rundown backwater and not exactly offering top facilities or teaching staff. Most people don’t think this far, but it’s obvious that Woo-ju has most likely been sent there there because it’s out of the way. His elite father is sick of his antics and is keen to limit the damage. Nevertheless, with his handsome looks and cool demeanour along with a touch of urban sophistication Woo-ju is an instant hit at school all of which inflames Yong-ki’s resentment especially when he seems to become friendly with Ji-sook.

Yong-ki sees Woo-ju as an embodiment of everything he’d like to be but isn’t, and is therefore desperate to knock him off his pedestal. Part of his resentment stems from the fact that Woo-ju has large numbers of online followers which seems to be how the kids measure success and social hierarchy. Yet through his investigations he discovers that Woo-ju may simply have paid for them, while there are rumours that he’s a bit of a playboy with a history of callous behaviour towards sexual partners. Others suggest that he was once a wimp and the shortest guy in class until his wealthy family got him growth hormones. His father clears up his messes by forcing people to sign NDAs, but Woo-ju may be a kind of victim too in that his father can’t accept failure and beats him every time he fails to win a judo match.

This fuels Yong-ki’s belief that they are basically the same in that Woo-ju is a loser too and the only difference between them is money, though rather than provoking empathy it seems to deepen his resentment. He becomes determined to avenge Ji-sook who has been seduced and abandoned by Woo-ju, becoming a figure of fun at school, as a means of convincing her to choose him, though she does not appear to have realised that Yong-ki has feelings for her. Abandoned by his mother who has not returned home in two months and has secretly been living somewhere else with a new man, Yong-ki’s sense of loneliness and desperation begins to push him towards an eventual explosion. Woo-ju too may have been fighting back against a sense of powerlessness, but his existence only bears out the ways in which Yong-ki continues to suffer because of social inequality. Han mixes media using CCTV footage, poetic black and white sequences, video cam, and VHS-style imagery to reflect Yong-ki’s childhood dreams while lending a note of ironic absurdity to the bleakness of his life in which the only possible reaction to his despair is violence.

Funky Freaky Freaks screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Peking Opera Blues (刀馬旦, Tsui Hark, 1986)

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“There aren’t enough heroes,” the leader of an opera troupe shouts, “quick, those of you who were villains change your clothes.” Only the names change in Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues (刀馬旦). Politics and history are mere performance in the revolving doors of power. Set in 1913 at the beginning of the warlord era that followed the end of the Qing dynasty, the film is also speaking to a nascent sense of Handover anxiety. As one warlord falls, another rises to take his place. When he too is defeated, the first warlord returns. Meanwhile, our heroes stand still as history happens around them without their consent, longing for an age of democracy which even now has not yet arrived.

As the film opens, warlord Tun (Huang Ha) is carousing with courtesans and boasting about his 28 wives when his soldiers begin to revolt because they’ve not been paid. Tun has lost all his money gambling and decides to flee while the soldiers loot the palace. His downfall both satirises the innate corruption of power and its anonymous nature as he is soon replaced by the governor who can’t believe his luck. The governor is accompanied by his androgynous daughter, Tsao (Brigitte Lin), who has short hair and dresses in military uniforms, and has recently returned after studying abroad. 

Unbeknownst to her father, Tsao is secretly working for the democratic resistance. President Yuan Shi Kai has been borrowing money from foreign banks to finance a bid to restore the monarchy. Tsao knows her father is the broker and plans to steal secret documents to expose Yuan’s corruption and thereby usher in a democratic revolution. Yet she also finds herself conflicted in the necessity of betraying her father knowing that she is the only person in whom she has absolute trust. In the absence of a son, he plans to hand his empire to her, only she doesn’t really want it. To find her new democratic future, she will have to let the old world die and that means letting men like Tun and her father go with it.

Her mission is contrasted with that of Bai Niu (Sally Yeh), the daughter of a Peking Opera troupe manager. Bai Niu’s greatest desire is to be on stage, but women are barred from performing. All female roles are played by men who are also sexuality exploited, essentially pimped out to important people and supporters to ensure the troupe’s survival. Though Tun and Tsao may openly vie for power, the real source of power lies with corrupt police chief, Liu (Ku Feng), who insists on sleeping with the troupe’s biggest star. When he flees, he gives Bai Niu his spot and permission to perform despite her father’s objections, but what she perhaps doesn’t realise is that this “freedom” also traps her with the threat of sexual exploitation, something she is later subject to while assisting with Tsao’s plan to knock her father out so she can steal the key to his safe.

Wandering musician Sheung Hung (Cherie Chung), meanwhile, is much more accustomed to using her sexuality to get by and seeks freedom through riches. She wants the money so that she can flee abroad, which is both an expression of a desire for broader horizons and that to escape the chaos of the warlord era. It also, of course, speaks to the present day and those planning to get rich quick and leave Hong Kong before the Mainland takes over. The three women in ways reflect different reactions to the looming anxieties of the Handover, Tsao the revolutionary staying to fight for democracy, Bai-niu holding fast to her family and culture and trying to live through it as best she can, and Sheung Hung who is planning to leave.

They are all, however, at the mercy of circumstance and there’s an essential irony in the film’s conclusion which leaves them all scattered, vowing to reunite when the chaos is over and democracy has been restored, given that this likely means they will never meet again as the promised age of democratic freedom has not yet come to pass. Yuan is exposed, but it makes no difference. As if signalling the absurdity, Tsui flashes back to the laughing face of the Peking Opera performer with which the film opened. Rocketing between farcical humour, the subversive homoeroticism between the women, the grim reality of authoritarianism as Tsao finds herself tortured by the resurgent Tun, and the kinetic energy of the finely crafted action scenes, Tsui finds a genuine sense of poignancy in the futility of of the heroes’ quest. Finally, the best weapon they have is friendship and solidarity in which they protect and save each other while otherwise at the mercy of history being made all around them that they are otherwise powerless to influence.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Kiss Me My Ghost Friend (啵me之我的青春住了鬼, Chen Ta-pu, 2026)

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A young director finds himself unwittingingly bonding with a ghost after agreeing to stage a performance in a disused theatre in Chen Ta Pu’s romantic dramedy, Kiss Me, My Ghost Friend (啵me之我的青春住了鬼, bō me zhī wǒ de qīngchūn zhù le). The theatre in question turns out to be haunted, not just by its past and legacy but by young woman betrayed in love whose story dovetails neatly with the tale he has been asked to tell.

To that extent, Jim is also haunted though only by the spectre of his father, a once prominent playwright who has become a recluse. His Bo-Chuan was to be a new and revolutionary kind of theatre updating traditional opera for a new age. It was, however, never staged and following the death of his grandfather, Jim’s mother wants to have the ASI theatre torn down. Jim is less than keen on accepting the job, in part because he is embarrassed by his privilege and prefers to keep the fact that he has a financial safety net in coming from a wealthy and prominent family secret, and because he does not really want to reckon with his family legacy.

The irony is that Jim’s previous show was an interactive ghost experience set in a disused building. Unfortunately, it failed to find an audience and the last performance had to be cancelled. After a year with no success, Jim’s theatre troupe is forced to disband and he’s dumped by his girlfriend, formerly the troupe’s lead actress. He wanted to explore the meaning of life through a ghost story, but laments that the audience just wanted entertainment. He has no idea that Shi is a ghost and originally believes her to be the assistant managing the theatre, but it’s true enough that she has a connection to the story of Bo-Chuan, not just in her involvement with the original production but the ways in which it mirrors her own life as a woman left in limbo, haunted by the spectre of lost love.

Bo-Chuan too waited 18 years for the man she loved to return, though while alive Shi had her doubts about the story. She thought this tale of love and sacrifice was too old-fashioned and bound to destructive patriarchal mores. If it were her, she says, she’d spend the 18 years looking for value in her life rather than waiting around for man. She and Jim’s father decide to change the end of the play, but still, Shi became a lonely ghost trapped in the theatre that itself became a relic of the past. Though she can no longer play a leading role, helping Jim stage another Bo-chuan with an ending of his own allows her to restore the theatre to what it once was, purifying it of its evil spirits and overcoming her romantic trauma.

Jim too gets a second chance at his artistic career having previously decided to give up the theatre after his repeated failures. Though a potential romance with Shi never gains traction, she does however lead him towards artistic fulfilment in the acceptance of his legacy as his father’s son as they finish the play together. The other members of Jim’s troupe too all come to accept Shi even after realising that she is a ghost. They too had all be financially inconvenienced by Jim’s failure, though unlike his girlfriend his troupe chose to stand by him and return for this gig in an apparently haunted theatre which nevertheless offers huge financial rewards. Unlike Bo-chuan, Ying Ying wouldn’t wait, but her place is quickly taken by Shi who patiently teaches Jim’s actors how to work with this more classical material. Though Jim’s mother may want to tear the theatre down because it reminds her of a past she’d rather forget and symbolises her guilt, in the end it becomes a place of healing that allows all to move on from the past while giving Jim’s theatre troupe a new place to belong along with a brighter artistic future rooted firmly in the past.

Kiss Me My Ghost Friend screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Street Kingdom (ストリート・キングダム 自分の音を鳴らせ, Tomorowo Taguchi, 2026)

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Tomorowo Taguchi is probably best known to international audiences for his starring role in Tetsuo the Iron Man, but he started his career as an illustrator and theatre actor while also active in Japan’s underground punk music scene as a member of the band Bachikaburi. For the last few decades, he’s been a fairly ubiquitous presence in mainstream Japanese films as a jobbing actor turning up in small supporting roles in all sorts of unexpected places, but Street Kingdom (ストリート・キングダム 自分の音を鳴らせ, Street Kingdom: Jibun no Oto wo Narase) is a look back to the early years of the punk movement and the creation of Telegraph Records.

Scripted by Kankuro Kudo, most of the names in the film have been slightly altered to reflect the fictionalisation of the narrative and so we follow Yuichi Hibiki (based on Yuichi Jibiki and played by Kazunobu Mineta), a struggling photographer who feels lost in an increasingly consumerist Japan. Like many of his generation, he spent his formative years in the student movement and is looking for a way to fill that void following the movement’s collapse in the wake of the Asama-sanso Incident. Japan’s economy had improved quite markedly by then and many former student protesters simply moved on into more mainstream lives as regular salaryman men and women, much as Yuichi’s friend has done by joining a record label and becoming obsessed with Pink Lady, the epitome of the disposable contemporary pop music topping the charts and making them money. Inspired by Yuichi, the friend later also jacks in his corporate career and becomes a punk rocker because he too discovers he wants more than the emptiness of a salaryman existence.

After a trip back to his family pig farm, Yuichi’s epiphany comes after hearing the Sex Pistols on the radio, though he is dismayed to find out that they have already broken up. Nevertheless, he determines to go Tokyo and find the real Japanese punk as opposed to that imported from New York or London. It’s inside this world that finds freedom outside of the Japanese mainstream as an independent artist, vowing to create a Street Kingdom with Momo (Ryuya Wakaba), the lead singer of influential band Tokage, and zine publisher Sachi (Riho Yoshioka). An out-of-touch journalist at one point tries to offer them expensive champagne and shames the band members for still living at home with their parents, and there is something a little bit incongruous about Momo’s lovely mother asking him what he wants for his tea before he goes off to play one of his anarchic gigs. But in another way, this is exactly the essence of punk in the sense of domesticity, friendships and solidarity that existed between the members of this community.

It all only begins to go wrong when the music labels start getting involved and commercial decisions conflict with artistic ones. Yuichi becomes a de facto manger because he’s a “decent” sort, which is to say he’s a bit of a square existing to one side of the movement which is a designation he resents at times, but also allows him a more privileged position of guiding it. He’s the one who advises they quit on a high after their “Tokyo Rockers” multi-band tour threatens to get too big and provoke rivalries and discord in what had been a fairly non-competitive, collegiate scene. He also helps Momo overcome some of his artistic conflicts by starting a parallel indie label so they can release songs the label rejects, such a nonsense tune about fish and pollution that the suits deem “too political”. What he can’t fully help with, however, is Momo’s descent into depression and drug abuse when the label pushes the band into debt, refuses to help financially after their band members are involved in a crash while on tour, and finally suggests they were only really interested in Momo as a potential solo artist doing more mainstream pop. Nevertheless, it’s Yuich’s friendly intervention encouraging Momo to get his act together that finally convinces him that something has to change.

To that extent, the film may be a fairly sanitised and nostalgic exploration of the director’s youth, but it’s also an advocation for dancing to one’s own tune which, it argues, has not necessarily become any easier in an age when anyone has access to the tools to become an artist. The punk spirit lives on in those who are prepared to be fully themselves in a culture that can be oppressively conformist and as the film would have it, the greatest legacy of the punk rock era was the sense of community between young people who wanted to build their own utopia which is something that in itself will never die.

Street Kingdom screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Brightest Sun (時には懺悔を, Tetsuya Nakashima, 2025)

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Tetsuya Nakashima’s more recent films have often dealt with more controversial subjects. His latest, Brightest Sun 時には懺悔を, Toki ni wa Zange wo), adapted from the novel by Bunzo Uchiumi and delayed from last year due to allegations made by an actress on World of Kanako that nude footage was used without her consent, is not so much a film about disability as the taboo of parental selfishness or a sense of disconnection from one’s biological children.

Nevertheless, the way the film approaches it subject matter may seem insensitive to some in that it often reduces the existence of disabled children to a burden that must be born by someone and preferably by a biological parent. Though rookie detective Satoko (Hikari Mitsushima) raises the issue of the child’s subjectivity and quality of life, others struggle to see him as anything more than an object for which someone must accept responsibility. This is doubly true for her reluctant partner, Satake (Hidetoshi Nishijima), who has taken to drink and is riddled with guilt over his ambivalent feelings regarding his own disabled son who has since passed away. His wife (Ko Shibasaki) has fallen into depression and is living in a psychiatric facility while he is seemingly incapable of caring for their teenage daughter who has become resentful of both parents, feeling as if they were unable to care for her because all their attention went to her brother while she too now feels guilty that she did so little for him and left his care entirely to her mother.

At times, the film is critical of this tendency to force women to accept full responsibility for childcare while men remain otherwise absent from the domestic space, but seems to walk this back in the closing moments. In any case, Satake’s rejection of his son is mirrored in that of Tamie’s (Haru Kuroki) husband who openly declares that it would have been better if Taku had not been born, blaming Tamie for giving birth to a disabled child. His embarrassment makes plain a lingering stigma towards disability or difference in the wider society, as if having a child he sees as imperfect reflects badly on him personally. Tamie, meanwhile, seems as if she may have been suffering from a kind of post-natal depression and is clearly affected by her husband’s resentment along with her own inability to bond with the baby. Though she witnesses her child being kidnapped, she does nothing to stop it with implication being that perhaps she is glad to be relieved of the burden. 

Satoko too has become estranged from her young daughter who struggles with the trauma of witnessing her stab her abusive husband. The implication is that this resentment is born of having seen through her mother and realised that she did not do this out of a desire to protect her, but merely out of selfish rage. The fact is that her desire to protect Shin/Taku is a displacement activity. Everyone’s actions are to one extent or another a vicarious attempt to atone for something they are otherwise unable to address in their own lives. 

This appears to have been true for the man whose murder they are supposed to be investigating, Yonemoto (Jiro Sato), who is said to have been the worst of the worst. Someone who really was “better of dead” as Satoko puts it, though we never really find out why exactly everyone had such a low opinion of him and the detective company itself does not actually seem as sleazy as one might expect. Satake suspects he may have planned to blackmail Tamie, who has since remarried and has two step-children, over the discovery of her son, but in fact he was apparently quite moved by the tender care the kidnapper provided to Shin/Taku all these years and though knowing that he should turn him in, wanted to ensure the child would continue to be well cared for. 

This is apparently where Yonemoto found the redemption centred in the Japanese title and explained in an opening title card. Satake similarly is forced to face his complicated emotions towards his son and family, trying to do the best for Shin/Taku as means of assuaging his guilt much as Satoko shifts her maternal anxiety onto Tamie. The film’s conclusion seems to undercut the idea presented by the policeman that blood ties may not be that important, having witnessed the care and devotion the kidnapper showed to a child that was not his by blood and had complex needs, in its concerted efforts to force Tamie to accept her maternity. Nevertheless, the film does its best to extend sympathy and understanding to all, suggesting that the best thing to do in this situation might have been to leave well alone, but for various reasons that won’t be possible. Opting for a noirish aesthetic, Nakashima abandons his pop aesthetics for something a little more subdued but maintains his fast-paced editing style, drip-feeding us the mystery while pondering the nature of the bonds between parents and their children.

The Brightest Sun screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Curse (ザ・カース, Kenichi Ugana, 2025)

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Could it be fair to say that sometimes we curse ourselves, or perhaps more accurately that the only true curse is morbid curiosity? Those at the centre of Kenichi Ugana’s J-horror inspired The Curse (ザ・カース) have the option to simply stay off social media, but they find themselves unable to do so. Be careful what you post about yourself online, the film seems to say, as if an Instagram profile were basically opening a portal to your soul through which any evil entity pass.

But at the same time, a priest cautions that one may do harm to others without even realising it and it transpires that even the most innocuous of posts can be enough to push someone over the edge. The versions of their lives that people post online are obviously idealised or perhaps aspirational, but they can still provoke a sense of jealousy or envy to the extent that saying “I am having a lovely day” can upset someone who is not and perhaps has not for a long time but continues to hate follow these kinds of accounts. This in itself is a kind of curse, the film argues, as a deepening sense of self-loathing is projected outward towards those apparently living better lives the unhappy obsessive feels they may not deserve.

Still, there is an extent to which the curse is also “real”. When Riko (Yukino Kaizu) spots a creepy photo posted by a friend, Shufen, which is accompanied by the caption “Drop dead already, all of you” and seems to contain the image of a malevolent entity, she is of course immediately concerned. Her anxiety is compounded by the fact that her friend is Taiwanese and posts in Mandarin, so she uses the auto translate feature but has no way of knowing if the translation is accurate. When Shufen fails to reply to messages, Riko decides to get over her sense of awkwardness and contact her ex in Taiwan, a mutual friend. Confused, Jiahao (Yan Yu Teng) tells her Shufen died six months previously in circumstances so strange and disturbing her family preferred to keep it quiet. “Curses are very real, in Taiwan at least,” he tells her. People die from them. 

Riko then faces another barrier in trying to navigate her away around the ritual beliefs of another culture. When her friend Airi began exhibiting strange symptoms after watching a video online, she took her to a doctor who was unable to help. After her Taiwanese friends recommend an exorcism, she begins to feel guilty. Perhaps if she’d contacted a priest instead of a doctor, she could have been more help to Airi. The Japanese-speaking priest in Taiwan isn’t necessarily that much help either, though. He demands payment up front, which reduces his credibility and opens the door to the suggestion that the rituals he provides are more placebo effect than anything else. Nevertheless, it seems he really does have the power to intervene with spirits, only this one is a little beyond his capabilities.  

There’s an essential irony in the fact that Riko is only able to detect the ghostly presence through its reflection in images while otherwise unable to see it lurking in the shadows or under her bed. This embodiment of resentment seems to affect her offline life too as the manager of the upscale hair salon where she works begins to act strangely towards her and a homeless man he warns her about arrives to advise she deal with her ghost problem before it gets out of hand. Ugana frequently cuts back to the ranks of disembodied mannequin heads that line the salon as a kind of foreshadowing lending the place an ominous quality and perhaps playing into the anxieties of the antagonist with its elitist vibes and unwelcoming atmosphere. Perhaps the real villains are unfair female beauty standards, ageism, and lookism, or equally perhaps we’re back at the figure of a witch who doesn’t want to grow old and is cursed with vanity, resentful of those who possess a beauty she believes herself to have lost. Turning unexpectedly bloody in final moments, the film suggests that this particular curse will never be lifted in part because it has become its own reward as this this particular malevolent entity dances cheerfully in her garden, secure in the knowledge that no one is watching.

The Curse is on UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand digital platforms 13 July

Trailer (English subtitles)

Fantasia International Film Festival Confirms Complete 2026 Programme

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The Fantasia International Film Festival returns for its 30th edition taking place once again in Montreal from July 16 to Aug. 2. As usual this year’s programme includes a host of new and classic features from East Asia:

China

Hong Kong

Indonesia

  • Levitating – Supernatural drama in which a young man dreams of becoming a shaman.
  • Sleep No More – Darky comic supernatural thriller from Edwin.

Japan

  • Screenshot
  • AnyMart – Bloody combini life satire starring Shota Sometani.
  • Beasts Clutching at Straws – Crime thriller directed by Hideo Jojo and adapted from the novel by Keisuke Sone previously adapted in Korea as Beasts Clawing at Straws.
  • Break Free – Zany comedy in which a yakuza’s tiktok dance goes viral.
  • Captured! – Quirky horror in which a young woman starts a horror blog only to find herself haunted for real.
  • Cherry and Virgin  – Animation exploring the relationship between a commercial illustrator and an erotic manga artist.
  • Cocoon – One Summer of Girlhood  – Animated adaptation of the manga by Machiko Kyo recounting the story of the Lily Corps during the Battle of Okinawa.
  • Gozu – Surreal gangster drama from Takashi Miike.
  • GROTESQQQUE – Three part anime anthology from Atsushi Nishigori. World Premiere.
  • The Mouths – Horror from Takashi Shimizu in which university friends investigate a haunted tree.
  • Nameless – A man who can kill with a seemingly invisible weapon goes on the rampage after being harangued by a religious woman in a cafe, leaving police and witnesses baffled in Hideo Jojo’s adaptation of the manga by actor and comedian Jiro Sato. Review.
  • Never After Dark – Horror from Dave Boyle following a spirit medium who guides wandering souls to the afterlife.
  • A New Dawn – Anime in which childhood friends reunite and two brothers face the closure of their family fireworks factory.
  • The Origin of Ultraman – Documentary exploring the origins of the classic tokusatsu series overseen by Hirokazu Koreeda.
  • Redline – Takeshi Koike’s classic 2009 racing-themed anime.
  • The Samurai and the Prisoner – Mystery period drama from Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
  • Sekiro: No Defeat – Anime set in the Sengoku era in which a ninja must rescue a kidnapped child.
  • The Specials – Comedy from Eiji Uchida in which yakuza must post as a dance troupe to assassinate a rival.
  • Suzuki=Bakudan – Cat and mouse game between a mass bomber and a brainy policeman. Review.
  • TOKYO BURST: Crime City – Japanese spin-off of Ma Dong-seok’s Roundup series directed by Eiji Uchida.
  • Village of Eight Gravestones – Adaptation of the classic novel by Seishi Yokomizo directed by Takashi Shimizu.
  • When You Open the Door – Horror starring Serena Motola as a young woman drawn to a woodland shrine.
  • Wind Breaker – High school fighting drama from Kentaro Hagiwara.
  • You Are the Film – Directorial debut from screenwriter Makoto Ueda in which a screenwriter and musician somehow end up watching each other’s experience on the big screen.

Philippines

  • Hayop Ka! – Steamy grown-up animation following the romantic adventures of a shopworker.
  • Zsazsa Zaturnnah – LGBTQ+ themed superhero animation.

South Korea

  • Colony – Latest from Yeon Sang-ho in which a professor is trapped in a building with a mysterious virus.
  • The Eyes – Korean take on Julia’s Eyes.
  • The Journey to Gyeong-Ju – A mother sets out to get revenge against the man who killed her youngest child.
  • The Mutation – A man discriminated against because of his skin colour and a gay woman whose partner took her own life after being forced into a heterosexual marriage embark on a road trip.
  • Niko – A broke screenwriter suddenly disappears in Seoul.
  • The Seoul Guardians – Documentary focusing on Yoon Suk-yeol’s declaration of martial law.
  • Tristes Tropiques – Children trained to be assassins turn against each other in this action thriller from Park Hoon-jung.

Taiwan

Thailand

  • God Skin – A desperate young man agrees to fight in a tournament in which rich people can send booster shots to their favourite players through VR tattooes.

Vietnam

The Fantasia International Film Festival runs in Montreal, Canada, July 16 to Aug 2. Full details for all the films along with scheduling and ticketing information are available via the official website, and you can also keep up with all the latest news via the festival’s Facebook page, Bluesky, Instagram, and Vimeo channels.