Hirokazu Kore-eda

IFFBoston 2026 Fall Focus, Week 1

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IFFBoston’s ancillary Fall Focus Film Festival has grown from four films over a long weekend in 2015 to twenty-seven titles over two weeks in 2026. Bringing in nearly all of the award-season heavies coming out between now and the end of the year, it’s appointment viewing for Boston-area cineastes. Below are reviews of the six titles I saw during week one; the fest takes a break until resuming with week two starting October 29.

Possible Love

I’m convinced South Korean director Lee Chang-dong will never let me down. His glacial work ethic (one feature every 7-8 years) probably helps but since Secret Sunshine, everything of his has been essential, including this parable about a working-class family participating in a documentary and getting a little too close to its far more affluent director. Not a groundbreaking premise, but completely relevant in the age of content creation and blurred boundaries between an auteur and their subjects. As the profiled family’s mother, Jeon Do-Yeon is phenomenal with her body language and what she withholds and occasionally reveals.

All Of A Sudden

What I said about Lee goes double for Ryusuke Hamaguchi as his latest deserves all the attention and acclaim of his breakthrough Drive My Car. Centered on a director of a nursing home in France (a superlative Virginie Efira), this illustrates the director’s comfort in working outside East Asia for the first time, though a transplanted Japanese co-lead (Tao Okamoto) enables him to translate this cultural background to another setting. Very few films fully get at the essence of life and human nature in such a refreshing but also familiar way. As with Happy Hour and Drive My Car, the lengthy duration is key as feelings slowly accumulate and resonate until they crescendo powerfully at the end.

Look Back

At the very least an improvement over Sheep In the Box from earlier this year, Hirokazu Koreeda’s manga adaptation about two female teens who bond in their shared love of drawing is among his simplest and most immediate films—that is, until a third act reveal that doesn’t so much derail momentum as it punctures some of what made it special (no matter how true it stays to the source material.) Still worth watching for admirers but Koreeda’s work with younger actors is better showcased in Monster and Nobody Knows, among others.

Club Kid

Despite the ridiculous, “Big Daddy but for gays” premise and writer/director/star Jordan Firstman more compelling a presence than artist (for now), I liked this and fully understood its crowd-pleasing reputation because man, he has so much unexpected potential. He can play shades of himself that go far beyond snarky gay influencer and his ensemble cast is strong, from Kirby Howell-Baptiste against type as a hot mess and Colleen Camp (Yvette from Clue!) as a nosy neighbor to newcomers Edgar Isgandarov (with his sharp comic timing) and young Reggie Absolom, who could easily end up his generation’s Nicholas Hoult (a good thing!)

Minotaur

Adapting Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife (later remade as Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful), Andrey Zvyagintsev’s his first flick in nearly a decade unfolds with the director’s patented ambiguity, although one could also argue nothing happens in the first hour. That can’t be said for the second hour, fortunately. Russian corruption is still his preferred medium and the war with Ukraine has certainly incensed it, even if it’s not so much a return to form as a continuation of his past approach with somewhat diminished returns. At least it shows that one can still be a stupendously dumb criminal in contemporary Russia and get away with it!

Wild Horse Nine

Rest assured, John Malkovich is as great here as the hype suggests, leaning heavily into the exquisite bitch mode only he does so well. Sam Rockwell’s nearly his equal, playing off him wonderfully with just the right amount of snark and exasperation. There may be less going on (beyond the snappy dialogue, anyway) than in the average Martin McDonagh film although the Easter Island, 1973 setting is even more striking than the 1920s coastal Ireland of The Banshees of Inisherin. A hilariously blowsy Parker Posey makes the most of her two scenes as Rockwell’s trophy wife.

2026 Movie Review Capsules, #3

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Another ten 2026 released films, roughly in order of preference from best to worst, all of them streamed at home apart from Backrooms and Sheep In The Box, the latter with a brief in-person intro from Kore-eda himself.

Omaha

Not one minute wasted in this impressive, well-constructed debut feature. The reliable John Magaro is outstanding here and this makes one want to gift him Josh O’Connor-level ubiquity.

Dead Man’s Wire

Solid for-hire work from Van Sant recreating a time and place (Indianapolis, 1977) with pinpoint accuracy. I just wish they hadn’t shown archival footage of the real guys at the end for Skarsgard and Montgomery are just too pretty in comparison, exceptional as the former’s performance may be (Elwes’ gruff, grizzled cop is far more believable.)

The President’s Cake

Revives the tradition of kids having to complete ridiculous tasks in an adult world going back to Kiarostami and further still to The 400 Blows. Looking forward to more from this director (and more Iraqi cinema in general.)

Magellan

What better way to celebrate the 250th birthday of my home country than with this damnation of colonialism as I did? One of the more visually striking and composed films I’ve seen of late, and I can only imagine its impact doubling when viewed in a cinema.

Backrooms

Deeply unnerving more than explicitly horrific and at times, better for that. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve are both essential to this film’s surprise success although the suitably eerie production design (is this how Gen Z perceives the aesthetics of my high school years?) contributes just as much.

Bang My Box: The Robin Byrd Story

Sex-positive pioneer Byrd is a national treasure which makes this hard to fault for being essentially a hagiography. Still, the excess of archival footage is a reminder that we need more documentaries about cable access TV before memories of it completely ebb from our collective consciousness.

Sheep In The Box

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s inessential but pleasant sci-fi/AI fable is perhaps the highest concept he’s forged since After Life but he doesn’t do enough with it, utilizing it as a catalyst for a family drama without fully realizing its potential. If the story overall lacks urgency (or coherence), at least his directorial prowess makes this an engaging watch. The production design’s nearly as striking as, say, Almodovar’s (though more Japanese, obv.) and the references to The Little Prince lending the film its title are thoughtful. Also, as the father, Daigo Yamamoto exhibits just the right blend of pragmatism, snark and genuine feeling.

Project Hail Mary

What a peculiar mashup of 2001: A Space Odyssey and E.T. Makes smart use of Ryan Gosling for his comedic talents and also of Sandra Huller for her nimble gravitas. Rocky proves a tad too much of a good thing as the film wears on. Mostly deserving of its success even though it’s clearly Made For Schoolchildren (to quote a phrase an old friend often used in his film criticism.)

Andre Is An Idiot

Sincere if somewhat banal but its candidness in talking about death and dying is admirable. Can we please get Jason Mantzoukas to play him in the biopic?

She’s The He!

Raunchy teen sex comedies just aren’t for me but co-lead Misha Osherovich has some potential—hook them up with Jane Schoenbrun (or any good director, really.)

Four Fall Focus Gems

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IFF Boston’s annual Fall Focus is always a good bet: this year, I got to see four movies I couldn’t get tickets to at TIFF, and all of them were good-to-great (and three were filmed in Japan, coincidentally.)

FALLEN LEAVES

From its opening shot, there’s no mistaking this for the work of anyone other than veteran Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki. A purveyor of humor so deadpan, less attentive viewers might not even detect it on occasion, he’s influenced many kindred spirits and followers from Roy Andersson to Jim Jarmusch (whom he pays a somewhat twisted yet hilarious tribute to here.) His first film in six years is one of his most deceptively straightforward: a burgeoning middle-aged romance between supermarket worker Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and alcoholic laborer Holappa (Jussi Vatanen). The Helsinki settings look like they’ve been etched in time over the past fifty years, although occasional radio broadcasts reporting the current Russia/Ukraine war are scattered throughout. Happily, this fully plays to Kaurismaki’s strengths: of the handful of his films I’ve viewed, this is easily the funniest, especially the karaoke bar scenes featuring Holappa’s self-assured (if only to a point) co-worker/pal Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen). As usual with this director, what would often come off as affectations for most filmmakers are in his hands fully realized and seamlessly essential to the entire fabric. (Grade: 8/10)

EVIL DOES NOT EXIST

So, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, what are you doing now after all that acclaim (including the Cannes Palme d’Or and an Oscar) for DRIVE MY CAR? A study of an environmental threat towards a remote community where a corporation wants to open a glamping (ie-glamourous camping) site, you say? Far more Tarkovsky than Ozu, EVIL DOES NOT EXIST is leisurely paced, visually stunning and and in the end, near-impenetrable–not entirely a deficit depending on one’s expectations. Arguably no other filmmaker would so totally depict the utter futility of “information meetings” where the concerns of said community are both heard and blithely dismissed, or take two characters who initially seem buffoonish and unexpectedly flesh them out until they’re nearly as sympathetic as the two protagonists. Those looking for another cathartic wonder like DRIVE MY CAR won’t find it here, but it offers a lot to unpack and ponder; at a mere 106 minutes, it also more conveniently lends itself to a rewatch or two. (8/10)

MONSTER

This is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first film set in his native Japan since SHOPLIFTERS and also his first that he hasn’t written himself since MABOROSI, his 1995 feature debut. Rest assured, MONSTER is completely in the director’s wheelhouse of domestic dramas, although screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto’s ambitious, RASHOMON-esque structure is something new for the director. The first third or so comes off as a darkly comic fable about a fifth-grader being bullied by his teacher; what happens next sets the momentum for a narrative only fully revealed one all of its pieces gradually fall into place–one that also makes it tough to write about without any spoilers. I’ll just note that the end result is one of Kore-eda’s most accessible works in part due to its swift pace where the rhythms are enhanced by its unique structure, but also one of his warmest and most resonant. You can sense his humanist approach towards nearly every character as the story unfolds. In some ways, it’s a good companion to Alexander Payne’s THE HOLDOVERS as it similarly clinches one’s attention with humor and a tricky premise but then extends an invitation to learn the full story and witness how we can instill change in one another. (10/10)

PERFECT DAYS

Well, this was an unexpected late-career triumph from Wim Wenders, who arguably hasn’t made a good narrative film in over three decades; that it’s simply a character study about Hirayama, an aging man who cleans Tokyo public toilets for a living only adds to its allure. Featuring a powerful lead turn from SHALL WE DANCE star Kōji Yakusho (appearing in nearly every scene), this might be the closest Wenders has come to successfully making “slow cinema”. Scene after scene unfolds of Hirayama methodically cleaning a wide array of the city’s public toilets (many of them built for the delayed 2020 Summer Olympics) with pauses for how he spends his leisure time by bicycling, picking up paperbacks from his favorite book store, reading them as he has lunch in a leafy, secluded spot and listening to music on cassette tapes (!) while driving through greater Tokyo. It’s this last activity that’s most significant–not only does it give an outsider a vivid sense of what the city is really like, the music (mostly English-language rock from the 1960s and 70s) and its curation almost tells a parallel story. I’ve rarely seen such an extensive depiction of a character’s relationship to music and how it informs and fortifies his well being. While overall this could’ve been perhaps 20-30 minutes shorter, it almost feels hypnotic if you stick with it. The last shot, which returns to Hirayama and his music is a great one and also confirmation that this gentle, beatific but wonderfully human and flawed man embodied by Yakusho is a career-best performance. (9/10)

Three Fall Focus Films

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IFF Boston’s Fall Focus is a counterpart to their main film festival in late April/early May (in my opinion the best in the area.) Since this offshoot began about 7 or 8 years back, I’ve caught titles there such as Anomalisa, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Cold War and Shoplifters. After an online-only edition in 2020 and my skipping it last year, it was a treat to return. Of the eleven films playing over four days (plus two bonus titles afterwards), I saw these three.

WOMEN TALKING

Sarah Polley’s return to directing after a decade carries almost ridiculously high expectations due to her previous, consistently strong body of work (Away From Her, Take This Waltz, Stories We Tell) and all the awards season hype already showered upon this new film, which Polley adapted from Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel. Happily, Women Talking mostly meets them.

Set in a remote, rural, unnamed religious community (though Mennonite seems most likely), it revolves around an emergency, clandestine meeting among about a dozen of its women. Upon discovery that some of their men are drugging and raping them, they debate whether all the women should stay and fight back or leave the settlement with their younger children. It takes place in the near-present, though with the addition of an unlikely musical cue it could reasonably be any time since the late 1960’s; it also leaves open the possibility that it could even be in the near (or remote) future.

Much of it is exactly what the title promises: the women process the dilemma before them, discussing and arguing at length the implications of what courses of action are available to them. If this sounds dry and overly, well, talky, it’s visually far less static and isolated than something like last year’s (admittedly great) Mass. Polley not only sculpts dialogue to ebb and flow naturally like a good screenplay should, she also comprehends the value of opening up this world cinematically when the time is right for it. As the camera moves around and sometimes away from the barn where much of the action occurs, one can usually sense Polley’s hand as an additional unseen character right beside the women, reacting to and often enhancing what transpires.

The superb ensemble cast includes indie-friendly stars (Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy), Canadian stalwarts (Sheila McCarthy, Michelle McLeod), revered veterans (Judith Ivey and in a smaller role, Frances McDormand) and Ben Whishaw as the sole on-screen adult male, a sympathetic school teacher asked to take minutes of the meeting (most of the women there are not taught to read and write.)

As the women work their way towards decisive action, the film accumulates considerable power, laying out what’s at stake for these characters, illustrating their turmoil (but never in an exploitative way) and placing it in a larger context that strives to be universally applicable. Occasionally, the story oversteps, simplifying logistical concerns for actions taken; the final section also drags a bit, reiterating ideas and emotional beats already touched upon. However, those are minor missteps. The world Polley depicts is contained to the point of being restrictive; Women Talking, with great catharsis and reasoning explains with artful clarity as to why this is damaging and what future generations can do to avoid succumbing to such a closed-off, incomplete life. (4.5 out of 5)

BROKER

After a brief sojourn in France (The Truth), director Hirokazu Kore-eda made this movie in South Korea rather than his home country of Japan, purportedly so he could work with the actor Song Kang-ho (he was most recently the patriarch in Parasite.) As with its predecessor, the shift in locale does not mean any departure in style or tone, though some parts of Broker might comprise his most overtly comedic work in years.

The plot, however, is the stuff of drama and suspense. Two men, Sang-hyun (Song) and Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) run an illegal business in Busan where they steal abandoned infants from a church’s drop-off box and sell them on the black market. It works swimmingly until So-young (singer/songwriter IU), a teenage mother in the process of dropping off her own baby discovers their scheme and joins them to interview prospective adoptive parents. Meanwhile, two detectives (one played by Kore-eda alumnus Doona Bae, now middle-aged but still fabulous) sit in their unmarked car and watch this all play out.

Although Broker won the Jury Prize at Cannes, it isn’t on the same level as Kore-eda’s very best work (my top four, chronologically: After Life, Nobody Knows, Still Walking, Shoplifters.) Actually, it’s slightly flabby (maybe 10-20 minutes too long) and although he retains a knack for getting amusing (but not irritating!) performances out of children, this film’s humor and pathos do not always sit comfortably alongside each other. Of course, as veteran auteurs go, Kore-eda is still in a class of his own. He may be relying on variations on familiar themes, but no one else matches his sustained comfort and nimble touch with depicting makeshift families and finding those ingenuous, unforced grace moments that co-exist with the mundane. (4 out of 5)

ARMAGEDDON TIME

The latest from writer/director James Gray is almost nakedly autobiographical. His 11-year-old alter ego, Paul (Banks Repeta) lives in Queens, 1980 (as Gray did), the younger son of a middle-class Jewish-American family whose grandfather (Anthony Hopkins) arrived at Ellis Island near the turn of the 20th century. A would-be artist prone to daydreaming with little traditional work ethic in him, Paul befriends Johnny (Jaylin Webb), an African-American classmate who was left back the previous year and is barely tolerated by their public-school teacher. His friendship with Johnny doesn’t so much open up a new world for Paul as it gradually puts into perspective his own place in the world and how his race and class afford him privilege; meanwhile, his grandfather helps him to understand the complexities of bearing such privilege along with the moral and ethical implications at risk as a result.

Gray gets the period look and feel exactly right but sometimes struggles with other details. Apart from Hopkins, Paul’s family can come off as stereotypical-verging-on-cartoonish; even worse, Johnny’s barely a character at all, a sacrificial lamb for Paul to learn from. The insertion of two real-life figures related to a former president also feels a little clumsy, reiterating the overall point by practically banging it into the ground. On the other hand, the film would fall apart without Repeta’s naturalistic performance; he’s certainly one of the more plausible 11-year-old film protagonists, itself a tough age to depict in that Paul is still an innocent child to a degree but also easily corruptible. Of the few Gray films I’ve seen (Ad Astra, The Immigrant) this is somehow the most satisfying but also the most flawed, which frustrates–I repeatedly sensed that he’s just too close to the material even though it’s undeniably his story to tell. (3 out of 5)