Mizoguchi and Godzilla in Tokyo

Junichi Okada costars as composer Hachidai Nakamura, and Tori Matsuzaka plays lyricist Rokusuke Ei. “Full of music and melodrama, including the alcoholic Nakamura’s tempestuous split from Ei and their tearful reconciliation,” writes Mark Schilling in his festival preview for the Japan Times, “Sukiyaki is squarely aimed at domestic fans, especially those old enough to remember the Showa Era (1926–1989) the film so nostalgically depicts.”

More than two hundred films will screen before Colony, another zombie movie from Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan), wraps this year’s edition on November 4. When Colony premiered in Cannes back in May, Jessica Kiang, writing for Variety, called it “an entertaining if empty-headed exercise in familiarity, with a few neat new tricks up its bloodstained, gore-flecked sleeve.”

The Centerpiece presentation, screening on November 1, will be Godzilla Minus Zero, writer-director Takashi Yamazaki’s follow-up to Godzilla Minus One (2023), the first non-English language film to win an Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects. “By dividing [Minus One’s] attention between mass destruction and the raw pain of post-WWII trauma, reconstruction, and societal reintegration—not to mention the atomic allegory—Yamazaki boldly reimagined the property while honoring the roots of the series’ 1954 original,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney.

“That same meticulously balanced duality is evident in the director’s approach to the scaled-up sequel,” adds Rooney, who finds Minus Zero to be “an equally thrilling jolt of marauding monster action anchored by tender themes of family, friendship, camaraderie, and personal courage. These are characters about whom we come to care deeply, and Yamazaki trusts his audience to know the value of time spent observing human relationships, ennobling the horror with tangible emotional stakes.”

Of the fifteen films screening in the main competition, Schilling singles out Two Cigarettes, Three Nights, an adaptation of Akane Chihaya’s 2014 novel Male Friend directed by Yukiko Mishima. Mayu Matsuoka (Shoplifters) stars as Kanna, a painter who reconnects with Haseo (Ryo Narita) after seven years. They wander Kyoto, Fukui, and Hiroshima, watch movies—including Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring (1949) and Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987)—and throughout, the nature of their relationship remains difficult to pin down.

Purposefully so, says Mishima. “I wanted to trace their emotions carefully, scene by scene, so that somewhere in there, people might recognize a piece of themselves,” she tells Sebastien Raineri in the Japan Times. “Not ‘I would do this,’ but ‘I know what it is to feel this way.’”

Among the festival’s eleven sections is Nippon Cinema Now, whose nine features include Yamazaki Riverside: Over an Actor’s Shoulder, Isshin Inudo’s documentary portrait of Tsutomu Yamazaki, who is best known internationally for playing the kidnapper in Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) and the truck driver Goro in Juzo Itami’s Tampopo (1985). Nippon Cinema Now—which, as of this year, is a competitive section—also offers Shinichiro Ueda’s Earthlings in Love, a feature fashioned from a widely viewed thirty-part vertical series about a film director with early-onset dementia who can only remember movies.

The Japanese Classics program features a sidebar celebrating the fifty-fifth anniversary of Roman Porno, a string of soft-core movies produced by Japan’s oldest film studio, Nikkatsu. Heads up, New Yorkers: From November 20 through December 6, Japan Society will present Nikkatsu’s Golden Age of Eros. “Adhering to a strict set of conventions—a sex scene every fifteen or so minutes, brisk seventy-minute runtimes, medium-sized budgets, and tight ten-day shooting schedules—the Roman Porno became known as one of the few avenues for aspiring filmmakers to make their debut and hone their craft as the studio apprenticeship system buckled,” note the programmers.

A major highlight not only of the Japanese Classics program but also of the festival’s entire 2026 edition will be the thirteen-film Kenji Mizoguchi retrospective. “One film not to be missed,” advises Schilling, “is a digitally restored version of Mizoguchi’s 1933 silent The Water Magician. This early masterpiece, featuring Mizoguchi’s signature mix of visual artistry and female-centered pathos, will be presented with a benshi (silent film narrator) and musical accompaniment.”

By the mid-1930s, Mizoguchi “had developed his own unmistakable style, avoiding close-ups and reverse angles and favoring a distant, mobile camera and prolonged, choreographed takes,” wrote Gilberto Perez in 2013. “A few years after the war, as if to confirm the opinion of critics who were calling him old-fashioned, Mizoguchi turned to classic Japanese literature for a series of films that, beginning with The Life of Oharu [1952] and continuing with Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954), would win him a top prize at Venice three years in a row and make his reputation in the West, which was then belatedly discovering the cinema of Japan. Some Japanese critics at the time objected to the liberties he took in adapting national classics. But that an artist can take liberties and still remain true to a tradition only attests to its vitality. As a national storyteller, Mizoguchi has few peers among filmmakers anywhere.”