Welcome to the final entry of three trailer posts for this week.
So far this week, I’ve posted about the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme line-up and the Japanese films at the Rotterdam International Film Festival 2026. I’ve watched To Catch a Thief (1989), Nipples (2005), and a grip of other pink films. The Heroic Purgatory podcast episode on Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice (2025) is also out, so please give it a listen!
What are the third set of new Japanese cinema releases?
Welcome to the second of three trailer posts.
Check out part one and come back tomorrow for the last.
What are the second set of new Japanese cinema releases?
Welcome to the first of three trailer posts.
Come back over the next two days for the rest.
Things are getting busy again with each week getting nearly 20 new releases or re-releases. This week, there’s something like 15 with a few TV spin-offs.
What are the first set of films for this week?
The 2026 edition of the Rotterdam International Film Festival will take place from January 29th to February 08th.
The 2025 edition of the Rotterdam International Film Festival runs from January 29 to February 08 and there’s a large Japanese contingent.
On top of recent releases like Tokyo Taxi, the latest work from master director Yoji Yamada, and Exit 8, a horror hit based on a video game, there are animated big-budget features as well as indie shorts from long-standing talents like Atsushi Wada.
Amidst familiar names are newer filmmakers giving their works a World Premiere. There is even a chap named Tetsuya Maruyama, an experimental filmmaker who is the subject of a festival strand.
Speaking of the experimental, there are plenty of boundary-pushing mid-length and short films, including one from Aya Kawazoe. The big draw for me are the remastered V-Cinema titles with bangers like Drug Connection and Psychic Vision: Jaganrei. These direct-to-video movies have been floating around on the internet in various states of quality for years but the ability to see remasters on the big screen is both a rarity and surely a pleasure.
Below is a list of Japanese features and shorts that have been programmed:
Continue reading “Japanese Films at the Rotterdam International Film Festival 2026”
The 2026 edition of the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme runs from February 06 to March 31 across 34 venues around the UK.
The theme is Knowing Me, Knowing You – The True Self in Japanese Cinema. The works programmed pursue the idea of whether it’s possible to know our true selves and be our genuine selves. It looks like there are 26 films programmed and they run a gamut of genres from comedy to horror and human drama. They are mostly 2020s releases, although there’s a Yoshimitsu Morita work from 2003, and a Kon Ichikawa work from 1958.
At first glance, the heaters (as in the audiences have been maxed out and people have singled them out as special) are Teki Cometh and the documentary What Should We Have Done?
I can vouch for Teki Cometh and I am eager to see the documentary. Of the others I have watched, Missing Child Videotape (review), A Bad Summer, The Hotel of My Dream, Nemurubaka, and Angry Squad, they are solid works – good entertainment films.
Without further ado, here are the films:
Welcome to the second of two trailer posts for this week.
Please check out the first one to get a view of the latest Japanese films to hit cinema screens.
I started this week by publishing a review of The Dreams in the Witch House, a PC game I bought on Steam a couple of years ago and finally played last year. I am playing Paranormasight and Undernauts: The Labyrinth of Yomi. I also played through the demo for Queen’s Domain.
What are the rest of this week’s releases?
Welcome to the first of two trailer posts.
Come back tomorrow for the next one.
I’ve watched a film a day and started off this week with We Are Zombies (2023) and gone into Wild Search (1989).
What are the films in the first trailer post for this week?
The 2023 game Dreams in the Witch House is an adaptation of the same-named H.P. Lovecraft short story set in the eponymous habitation. It’s one fans of Lovecraft’s works should check out, while casuals should find it easy to engage with.
Slight spoilers ahead.
The game is set in 1929, in the infamous town of Arkham, Massachusetts, and allows players to control Walter Gilman, a poor maths student boarding at the titular place. With rent paid on his garrett room for two months by a kindly aunt, he should be settling down to beginning life as a fresher at Miskatonic University, but his studies are interrupted by nightmares featuring a wizened crone and the sounds of rats in the walls.
These scary sights and sounds soon bleed into reality as the rat and crone constantly creep into Gilman’s room with cruel intent, getting closer and closer with each night until they physically attack him. The player is set the challenge of engaging in academia and investigations into the origins of the nightmares through furthering Gilman’s exploration of town and his studies into his thesis: connections between the occult and science through maths. What he finds out is that the legend of a witch named Keziah Mason and her familiar, Brown Jenkin, are at the heart of his troubles, that they have been terrorising town for 200 years and that it’ll be curtains if he doesn’t put a stop to their reign of terror.
明けましておめでとうございます
Welcome to the first trailer post of 2026.
Thanks for joining me! I hope that 2026 is great!
My Christmas was spent catching up on writing, films, games, and spending time with family and eating food, so that was good. Out of all the games I played last year, Fire Emblem: Awakening on the 3DS was my favourite and I am going to play Paranormasight next.
In terms of films, I ended up finishing the year with Hideo Jojo’s A Bad Summer. It was one of 400+ films I watched in 2025. I’ve already started 2026 with a movie marathon of, that of the Ghost Stories for Christmas series on BBC iPlayer.
In terms of 2025’s output, I’ll publish my Top Ten Films of the year soon. My last posts of the year were interviews: Toshio Sekine on Shambhala Story, and Teppei Isobe and Cocoro Asami on Truth or Lies. I saw both at Osaka Asian Film Festival 2025: Expo Edition and enjoyed the films. Listening back to the interviews, I think we all had a good time, so I really regret not putting them out sooner. It was good to get back into face-to-face interviews.
I suppose I should put New Year’s Resolutions down now and openly state my next goal which is to start living with my partner. She is my love and I don’t want to live without her. The move may not be easy but I have to do it.
What are the first Japanese films of 2026?
The subject of rental families and stand-in people for hire is hardly new material, with figures like Werner Herzog, Brendan Fraser, and even talk show host Conan O’Brien getting in on the act. Heck, earlier in December, the film Rental Family was released. Few films are as funny, heart-warming, and satisfying as Teppei Isobe’s Truth or Lies (review here), however. It’s an ensemble drama led by Cocoro Asami, an emotionally open and appealing actor who portrays Risa, an honest woman who overcomes heartbreak by falling into the rental person industry. While navigating the moral ambiguities of learning to live with lies, Risa’s penchant for honesty reforms and encourages the people who hire her as she channels personal experience and ideals into her acting.
It’s a simple formula but perfectly delivered with great comic turns by Sho Mineo as the schmoozer-to-loser ex-boyfriend, Tomoki Kimura as a veteran rental person who is Risa’s affable and sometimes lackadaisical boss, and a whole host of names I recognised from other Isobe works. Seeing familiar faces gave this film a pleasant vibe, like getting back together with the gang. The fact that Isobe has links to other “Rental Person” type films as editor on the omnibus movie Rental Family (2023) and Eriko, Pretended (2016) may have helped, but none have looked as good or hit the emotional highs for me as Isobe’s work.
Truth or Lies stood out amongst the Japanese features at Osaka Asian Film Festival 2025’s Expo Edition. Thus, I just had to interview him and star actor Cocoro Asami. The two proved to be fun and lively and I wish I had published this interview sooner. I’d like to thank both them and interpreter Yumi Deguchi for the interview.
Genkinahito 