2026 Summer Festival Preview

I just completed another pair of home video supplements, liner notes essays for releases still to be announced, and somehow it’s already festival season here at The Chinese Cinema. Over the next six weeks or so, I’ll be covering Japan Cuts, the New York Asian Film Festival, and the Fantasia International Film Festival. I’ve been covering each of the festivals for years now, initially either at InReview Online or the Mubi Notebook, but this is the first year my coverage of all three festivals will be published exclusively here at my own site. While I’ve been lucky to be able to remotely cover some movies playing at big festivals like Cannes, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Toronto, and Venice over the years, thanks to those outlets above and the wonders of digital screeners, these three July festivals have always been among my favorites, dedicated as they are to discovering and promoting the kinds of movies I like to champion: East Asian art house and genre cinema. This is especially the case since I haven’t been able to attend any festivals in person since before COVID—Vancouver and Seattle were my usual beats, but my kids are too busy now for me to take off for a week at a time to watch movies. And anyway, in the past six years SIFF has shrunk in half and VIFF dismantled their once-terrific East Asian film program). But Japan Cuts, NYAFF, and Fantasia are as strong as ever, and I’m excited to dive in to what they’ve got. Here are some of the titles I’m looking forward to.

Japan Cuts

First up is Japan Cuts, running July 8-18 in New York. The biggest title they’ve got this year is Matsui Daigo’s Rewrite, which I wrote about when it played Fantasia last year. It was, in fact, my favorite film of 2025, edging out CITY the Animation, One Battle After Another, Sinners, and Nemurubaka (which really should be playing at least one of these festivals). Rewrite is a reimagining of and response to The Girl Who Leapt through Time, previously adapted by Obayashi Nobuhiko and Hosada Mamoru, written by Ueda Makoto, the reigning genius of time-travel cinema (Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, River). It’s a fascinating film, and I’ve been waiting almost a year for more people to see it and help plumb its mysteries.

As for the rest of the festival, they’ve got Joe Odagiri directing himself in a dog suit in Gosh!! an adaption of, or extension of, or riff on, a three-part TV series he made five years ago and Suzuki=Bakudan, a mystery thriller about a serial bomber and the cops who are trying to outwit him. My perennial favorite Japan Cuts finds are the quirky slice-of-life indie films they dig up. Movies like Love and Goodbye and Hawaii, Amiko, Night is Short Walk on Girl, When Morning Comes, I Feel Empty, Plastic, Sayonara Girls, Kyrie, She Taught Me Serendipity, and The Gesuidoz. This year promises Yoyogi Johnny, about social anxiety disorder and the high school squash club. My kind of movie. There’s also an intriguing anime (Cocoon), a thriller with Creepy’s Kagawa Teruyuki as “a nebulous omen of catastrophe” (Sai: Disaster) and one of the three films by Uchida Eiji playing these festivals (Night Flower).

The New York Asian Film Festival

Running concurrently with Japan Cuts (poor New Yorkers, having so many great movies and movie theatres to choose between every day, I don’t envy them at all), July 10-26, is the NYAFF, America’s foremost showcase for East Asian film. The archival program this year has a handful of classic movies I’ve seen before: Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer (which reportedly has a sequel/remake, Chow’s first new film in almost a decade, since his last sequel/remake, The New King of Comedy back in 2019; Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai’s Fat Choi Spirit, like Shaolin Soccer one of the finest sports films ever made; Pang Ho-cheung’s early indie comedy You Shoot, I Shoot, and a couple of recent classic Korean horror films, Train to Busan, which pairs Jung Yu-mi and Ma Dong-seok, my two favorite Korean actors, along with two of my favorite film subjects (zombies and trains), and The Wailing. Those latter two are part of mini-retrospectives on their directors, Yeon Sang-ho and Na Hong-jin, respectively, on the occasion of their latest films, Colony and Hope, again respectively. I’m excited to see some of that earlier stuff: Seoul Station, Peninsula, The Yellow Sea, and The Chaser, especially. Also in the archival program is Miike Takashi’s Ichi the Killer, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Mon-Rak Transistor, the early 2000s Korean hit My Sassy Girl, and Andrew Lau’s The Storm Riders and Initial D, none of which I’ve seen yet but all of which I’m looking forward to.

The NYAFF has plenty of new releases too of course. Coming straight from small runs in US theatres are Cold War 1994 and We’re Nothing at All. The former is the third film in the Cold War series, a prequel, while the latter is the latest film by Herman Yau, always a favorite here at The Chinese Cinema. There are also what I hope are promising films from newer and/or less familiar directors: the Thai Western 4 Tigers; Japanese teen crime movie All Greens; Ma Sichun-starring romance Crossing a Dawn; Chinese box office smash Dear You; Andrew Lau’s The Dumpling Queen, featuring Kara Hui; Shiraishi Koji’s horror film Kinki; Giddens Ko’s Taiwanese martial arts film Kung Fu; Jack Ng’s A Guilty Conscience follow-up Night King; a movie whose title promises two of my favorite movie subjects (Samurai Vengeance); and of course a movie about Japanese rock music (see also Kyrie, The Gesuidoz), Street Kingdom.

Fantasia International Film Festival

Montreal’s Fantasia Festival has a wider scope than just East Asian cinema, of course, focusing as well on offerings from Canada, the US, and Europe, but it’s the Asian movies I’ll be covering here. And there’s more than enough promising titles there for me to find, even considering that I’ve already covered a handful of them.

Foremost among those is Yuen Woo-ping’s old school wuxia epic Blades of the Guardians, the best old school wuxia epic to get released in US theatres since Tsui Hark’s Legends of the Condor Heroes way back in. . . 2025. They’ve also got Kuei Chih-hung and Chang Cheh’s 1973 film The Delinquents, which I wrote about back when it played in Rotterdam in early 2020, and the excellent Vietnamese war film Tunnels: Sun in the Dark, which I covered when it played Rotterdam earlier this year.

There is, inevitably, a lot of overlap between the three festivals this year: Cocoon, Colony, Kung Fu, Suzuki=Bakudan, and We’re Nothing at All play at least two of the festivals, along with a couple of other titles which look intriguing (Sleep No More and Unidentified Murder). Fantasia too has a robust archival program, with the aforementioned The Delinquents along with another Miike movie I haven’t seen yet (Goku), the early 80s Taiwanese wuxia Thrilling Bloody Sword, the heroic bloodshed classics Hong Kong Godfather and City War, and the racing anime Redline, none of which I've seen yet.

Exclusive new releases include one of the most-anticipated films of the year, Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s The Samurai and the Prisoner, two more Uchida Eiji movies (Tokyo Burst: Crime City, a spin-off of the delightful Ma Dong-seok Roundup series and the yakuza dance musical The Specials), Shimizu Takashi’s Village of Eight Gravestones (the Japanese horror genre seems especially well-represented at Fantasia this year, a genre I'm only a little familiar with), Ueda Makoto’s directorial debut You Are the Film, some intriguing animes (the video game adaptation Sekiro: No Defeat, A New Dawn from former Shinkai Makoto collaborator Shinomiya Yoshitoshi, and Grotesqqque from former Anno Hideaki collaborator Nishigori Atsushi--speaking of Anno, Fantasia also has a doc on The Origin of Ultraman), and a bunch of other lower profile (to me) genre films that look intriguing to say the least—I counted at least forty films of interest in my initial look through the Fantasia program alone.

There’s no way I’ll be able to get to all of these movies of course. And a lot will depend on which films have screeners available of course. Last year, I covered a total of twenty films across the three festivals, and I hope to at least match that this year. Reviews will start dropping next week with Japan Cuts and continue throughout the summer. Stay tuned!