The honest answer about its standing: IndieWire notes Tokyo may still have work to do to catch up with Toronto's global profile. But the outlet also reports that journalists from around the world increasingly flock to the Ginza and Hibiya neighborhoods with the same enthusiasm they bring to Venice, Locarno, and Sundance. Tokyo's lineup, IndieWire says, is exciting because of its diverse, eccentric, and often revelatory collection of world premieres — most of them from Asia.

Here is a newcomer's guide to what makes this festival tick, and the five films IndieWire flags as must-see.

Why does Tokyo matter when Venice and Toronto already exist?

Festivals are marketplaces of attention. A premiere at the right festival can define how a film is seen for years. Tokyo's role, per IndieWire, is to showcase regional cinema that might otherwise travel slowly — a Competition slate drawing from Indonesia, China, Japan, and beyond — while also hosting a strong roster of what the outlet calls "map-agnostic gems" from around the world.

IndieWire highlights the range: Garin Nugroho's "Red Before Dawn" from Indonesia, described as a harrowing adventure film set in the shadows of colonialism; Qiu Jiongjiong's period fantasia "Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting" from China, starring Lee Kang-sheng, the actor known as a muse of Tsai Ming-liang; and from the host country, Akira Ikeda's "The Canary's Lullaby," a creature feature about an old lady who befriends a mysterious beast from the mountains.

The international side includes Milcho Manchevski's "Sister Brother Manhole Cover" — which IndieWire jokes should not be confused with Jim Jarmusch's most recent feature — Teodra Ana Mihai's "Heysel 85," about one of the deadliest soccer riots in history, and Sérgio Graciano's diaristic Portuguese jail drama "Memories of Prison," which connects to Manoel de Oliveira's "Days of Despair." The 2026 program also carries holdovers from the wider circuit, including "Behemoth!," "The Dreamed Adventure," and "Verity," plus a tribute to Ulrike Ottinger, a heavy anime presence, and a title IndieWire's critic admits he has not yet seen: "Bye Bye Love: Detective Is in the Bar."

For readers tracking festival premieres as a genre of their own, Cinefile keeps a running premieres calendar, and our festivals coverage follows how these slates shape the year in film. Readers following this should also see The Phantom of the Opera (2004 film) Review: Judged on Its Own Stage Terms.

What are the five must-see movies at TIFF 2026?

"Double Freedom" (dir. Lisandro Alonso)

The Argentine director's sequel arrives in Japan after a standout premiere at Cannes earlier in 2026, and IndieWire has already named it one of the best sequels ever made. The film revisits Alonso's 2001 debut "La libertad." As reviewer Vadim Rizov explains, re-staging sequences of a tree logger — the same actor, Misael Saavedra, performing the same tasks 25 years later — accentuates the passage of time in the simplest possible way. Broader social context, including the logger's sister set adrift by a collapsing medical and social safety net, expands the portrait. And in a detail critics will savor, Alonso restores his original ending, which he had been forced to change at the behest of Cannes head Thierry Frémaux — what Rizov calls long-stocked petty resentments turned productive.

"Even If Hell Came" (dir. Samuele Rossi)

A hyper-visceral survival drama about a 20-year-old partisan holding out in the Italian Alps during the winter of 1944, waiting for an Allied invasion that keeps not arriving. Germans are everywhere, food is running low, and the film, per IndieWire, never pretends otherwise. Much of it unfolds in drafty churches and deserted farms, and the outlet reads it as a story about how fascism's greatest weapon is that everyone will give up trying to fight it. Readers drawn to war cinema can compare it against our guide to The Best War Movies, Chosen for What They Say About War.

"Kefi" (dir. Saito Kisin)

The most irreverent film in the lineup, per IndieWire — a "profoundly strange ode to ordinariness" born from Kisin's unresolved state of mind after his father's death. It follows three sisters getting by after that loss, and the outlet compares it to a Hirokazu Kore-eda sibling drama spliced with a lo-fi Gregg Araki goof. It plays in the festival's "Nippon Cinema Now" sidebar, which IndieWire calls forward-thinking and necessary to check out.

Who is this festival for?

Anyone who wants to see regional premieres before they reach wider release. IndieWire will publish several full reviews from the festival, and the five-film list is pitched at people lucky enough to attend in person. For everyone else, the festival functions as a preview: the titles surfacing in Ginza and Hibiya in late October 2026 are the ones film fans will be reading about for months. Cinefile's movie reviews will follow the ones that travel.

The evidence so far establishes one thing clearly: Tokyo's 39th edition leans hard into Asian world premieres while keeping a genuine international bench. What remains unknown is which of these five will reach audiences beyond the festival circuit — and how the full reviews, still to come, will judge them.

A warning about what is absent: no film here treats combat as a theme park. Several are difficult to watch, and that difficulty is precisely why they last. The order runs roughly from descent to aftermath.

How the best war movies were chosen

Three questions sorted the field. Does the film know what war is, beyond logistics? Does at least one scene carry the thesis without narration? And does the film hold up when the politics of its moment fade? Ten films answered all three, across a century of screen war.

The madness school: Coppola's river

Apocalypse Now (1979) remains the essential descent, a Vietnam film that treats the conflict as a hallucination shared by an army. Captain Willard's boat trip upriver ends at Marlon Brando's Kurtz, a decorated officer who read the manual and went beyond it. The helicopter assault to Wagner is the famous set piece. But the thesis lives in smaller moments: an officer surfing a shelled point, supplies thrown at strangers, a journalist quoting the colonel like scripture. This connects to our earlier piece, Cast of It Ends with Us film: the roles and what each actor brings.

The institution as enemy: Kubrick's trench

Paths of Glory (1957) argues that the deadliest enemy wears the same uniform. Kirk Douglas's colonel defends three scapegoated soldiers after a hopeless advance, and Stanley Kubrick shoots the trenches in tracking shots that turn men into inventory. The court-martial, held in a palace while the condemned sit on chairs, says everything about who pays for command failure. The final scene, a German girl singing to a jeering room that goes silent, is among the great endings in American film.

Das Boot (1981) narrows the institution to a steel tube. Wolfgang Petersen's U-boat crew hunts in bursts and suffers for hours. The depth-charge runs, lightless and endless, make boredom the true enemy. Its argument is simple: most of war is waiting to be killed by physics.

Survival and the clock: three modern entries

Three of the best war movies of this century put survival itself on a clock. Saving Private Ryan (1998) opens with twenty-five minutes of Omaha Beach that redid the grammar of combat film, then earns its real subject: what eight men owe one replacement. Captain Miller's shaking hand tracks the cost better than any speech. Dunkirk (2017) strips war to geometry: a mole, a sea, an air, three clocks converging, with civilian boats as the cavalry. The Hurt Locker (2008) argues that the danger is wanting to go back. Jeremy Renner's bomb tech, standing lost in a grocery aisle, makes the point without a word.

The aftermath films: what stays after the guns

Come and See (1985) is the list's conscience. It follows a Belarusian boy through 1943 as his face ages a decade in days. The village barn scene is unbearable by design; the film argues that war's product is not territory but ruined children. Elem Klimov's camera barely flinches, and neither can the viewer.

Son of Saul (2015) shoots the camps in a square frame, with the horrors blurred at the edge. It follows one prisoner trying to bury one boy properly. Its argument is moral focus: the enormity is real, but a single duty is how a person stays human. Waltz with Bashir (2008), an animated film about a soldier's buried memory of Lebanon, argues that forgetting is its own battlefield. Its final minutes, real footage after eighty minutes of drawing, are devastating. For related coverage, see The Phantom of the Opera (2004 film) Review: Judged on Its Own Stage Terms.

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), the German adaptation from Netflix, closes the list by returning to Erich Maria Remarque's point: the war is a machine, and the armistice does not stop it. The final-day assault, ordered for pride in the last hours, is the machine's signature.

Conclusion: war movies as arguments

The best war movies are not about weapons; they are about what weapons reveal. Coppola indicts euphoria, Kubrick indicts command, Klimov indicts the species, and Nemes indicts chaos. Watch them in order and the genre becomes a century-long argument. That is the standard, and these ten hold it.

What the film is trying to do explains its shape. The novel is a romance that reveals itself as a story about damage passed down, about a woman watching her marriage repeat her parents'. The film keeps that sweep on purpose. This kind of story does not need a large cast. It needs a small one, built so that every player can shift a scene's temperature by a degree. The drama lives in small steps, not big turns, and the casting follows that rule. For related coverage, see Cast of Bullet Train film: the killers aboard, car by car.

Blake Lively as Lily Bloom

Lively has rarely had a role this size to herself, and she takes it with both hands. Her Lily is warm and watchful at once, a glow with a tremor under it. The performance lets the audience see the math behind the forgiveness, the reasons a smart person stays. Critics noted this was the first film role in years to match the impact of her television breakout. The part asks her to move between dread and memory, and she holds the line between the two. The role also came with a producer's seat, and the film's tight hold on Lily's point of view carries that mark. This connects to our earlier piece, X (2022 film) Review: Ti West's Slasher Cuts Both Ways.

Justin Baldoni as Ryle Kincaid

Baldoni the actor has the harder job. Ryle must stay plausible as the man Lily chose, even as the film documents what he does. The performance is built on walls, flashes of a temper that Ryle himself seems not to see. Reviewers found it layered because it never waves a flag. Directing himself, Baldoni keeps his own close-ups plain in the right way. That restraint is a kind of honesty, and the material needs it. The double duty shows in the pacing, which keeps his scenes short and to the point.

Atlas, Allysa and the supporting ring

Brandon Sklenar plays Atlas Corrigan, Lily's first love, who returns as the story's quiet counterweight. He gives the film a steady, baby-faced presence, and the story treats him as a door out of the cycle. Jenny Slate plays Allysa, Lily's friend from the shop and also Ryle's sister, a knot the film uses to tangle every loyalty. Hasan Minhaj plays Marshall, Allysa's partner, in the comic-relief register he has made his own. Amy Morton appears among the supporting players as well, in the kind of small turn that steadies a young cast.

The younger selves

The flashbacks needed a second cast, and the match is uncanny. Isabela Ferrer plays young Lily. Alex Neustaedter plays teenage Atlas. The pair line up with the adult actors so well that the cuts between eras feel like memory rather than recasting. That is a small thing the film gets quietly right, and it matters. The whole thesis of the story rests on the line between then and now staying unbroken, and these two keep it held.

Why the small cast fits the story

The novel found its audience through one tight point of view, and the film respects that. Almost every scene runs through Lily. The people around her exist in relation to her choices, which is why each casting decision carries so much freight. A wrong note in any of the five main roles would break the spell, since there is nowhere for a weak turn to hide in a frame this narrow. The cast of It Ends with Us film was never going to hide behind extras.

Conclusion: the cast of It Ends with Us film, weighed

Released in August 2024, the film became a sleeper hit on the strength of its audience, and the cast of It Ends with Us film is the mechanism. Lively supplies the inner life. Baldoni supplies the threat. Sklenar is the other path, Slate the comic spine, and the younger pair the past that explains it all. Each role is a load-bearing wall. That is the honest answer to what each actor brings.

What the film is trying to do is simple and hard. It wants to run a joke and a thriller on the same track. The premise needs actors who can play deadly serious one moment and absurd the next. That is why the studio stacked the deck with stars happy to work small. Nobody gets a backstory longer than a punchline. The casting has to do the character work, one face and one gimmick per killer, and the film trusts the audience to keep score. This connects to our earlier piece, X (2022 film) Review: Ti West's Slasher Cuts Both Ways.

The cast of Bullet Train film, car by car

Start with the twins. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Tangerine, tailored menace with an accent laid on thick. Brian Tyree Henry plays Lemon, his partner and the film's secret weapon. Lemon reads the world through Thomas the Tank Engine, and he turns that childish system into a working method. Joey King plays the Prince, a young killer who can summon tears on command. She is the scariest thing on a train full of murderers, and the film knows it. For related coverage, see The Phantom of the Opera (2004 film) Review: Judged on Its Own Stage Terms.

Then the specialists. Bad Bunny, credited as Benito A. Martinez Ocasio, plays the Wolf, an avenger with a wedding to settle. Zazie Beetz plays the Hornet, brief and lethal. Andrew Koji plays the father, a grieving man lured aboard by the Prince's cruelty. Hiroyuki Sanada plays the elder, a calm blade of a man waiting for the past to arrive. Logan Lerman is the first passenger to die, and his character keeps riding along afterward, a running gag of the grimmest kind. Each of these specialists gets a look, a weapon and a minute of fame, and the film moves through them like a variety show with a body count.

At the end of the line waits the reason for everything. Michael Shannon plays the White Death, the underworld boss whose reach turns every accident on the train into design. Sandra Bullock plays Maria, Ladybug's handler. She is a voice on the phone for most of the film, and the closest thing the story has to home.

The twins at the center

The film's most durable pleasure is the Tangerine and Lemon double act, and Henry did the deepest work to build it. He kept the role British and trained the accent. He went blond. He insisted that the pair's racial difference play as brotherhood, never as a joke, and that choice gives the film its warmth. Taylor-Johnson, given the flashier suit, plays straight man just often enough to make the bits land. Their scenes have the rhythm of a double act that predates the plot. That is exactly the illusion a film like this needs. The train keeps the whole plot honest, since no one can leave, and no one can arrive without consequences.

The star at the front

Pitt, deep in his middle-aged self-parody period, plays Ladybug as a man trying to manifest serenity while the universe declines to cooperate. The performance is nearly all reaction, eyebrows and apologies. It gives the film its comic pulse. A star of his size taking a role this loose is itself the joke, and Leitch, a former stunt coordinator, shoots around him so the mayhem stays crisp while the star stays loose. The part sits next to his cameos of the period, small jobs played for big laughs, and it is the loosest he has ever looked on camera.

Conclusion: the manifest, closed

Car by car, the cast of Bullet Train film amounts to a roll call of contract killers with one shared destination. The twins supply the heart. The Prince supplies the chill. The White Death supplies the plot, and Pitt supplies the shrug that holds it all together. Few casts of this size have been asked to do less acting and more being, and fewer still have made it look like this much fun. That is the whole pitch, and it still plays.

That choice is the whole review. Judged as normal cinema, the film can feel stiff and loud. Judged as a record of a show meant to be felt in the body, it works more often than its reputation claims. The two standards give opposite verdicts. So this review judges The Phantom of the Opera (2004 film) on the terms it set for itself. This connects to our earlier piece, X (2022 film) Review: Ti West's Slasher Cuts Both Ways.

The Phantom of the Opera (2004 film) meets its audience halfway

Schumacher wrote the script with Lloyd Webber, and their changes are small. The score arrives intact. What changes is access: faces where a theater gives figures, and close-ups where the crowd sits far away. The opera house itself was built for angles no seat could buy.

The opening states the bargain in one bold stroke. The film starts in 1919, in faded black and white, at an auction of the old house's remains. A chandelier is unveiled, and as it rises the dust rolls back into the full color of 1870 while the orchestra swells. It is the film's best idea: the past restored before our eyes.

From the mirror to the lair

The first act builds the way it must, through Christine's rise. Emmy Rossum, still a teenager during filming, plays the chorus girl led from the ballet line by a voice she believes is her dead father's angel. The trip through the mirror and down to the underground lair, with candles rising from the water, keeps the stage images while the camera finds them at walking pace.

Patrick Wilson's Raoul is warmer and less stiff than the role often reads, which matters: the triangle needs a live option besides the masked man below. Miranda Richardson's Madame Giry moves through the plot with the tired air of a woman who has seen this disaster coming for years. Minnie Driver's Carlotta, the diva undone by sabotage, is the film's comic engine, and her fury is funny on purpose.

The casting bet: youth over polish

The film's biggest gamble was casting young rather than casting operatic. Gerard Butler's Phantom is a rock-voiced, wounded man, and his singing still divides viewers. The choice narrows the gap between the Phantom and the lovers around him: this is a story about damaged young people, not about monuments. Rossum, trained at the Metropolitan Opera as a child, sings with startling ease.

Scene by scene, the bet pays off unevenly but honestly. Music of the Night, staged as a slow seduction in candlelight, works because Schumacher lets it run as pure spectacle. The rooftop love duet gains real tenderness from winter light and open sky. Masquerade, the show's biggest crowd scene, trades the stage staircase for a swirling waltz of costumes.

What the camera adds, and what it fusses over

Schumacher's worst habit is decoration: mist, gold, snow, and candles used past all reason. His best habit is mercy with pain. The unmasked face is shown briefly, and the camera does not gloat. A cemetery sword fight the stage never tried shows the film earning its medium in short bursts.

Sound does heavy lifting in The Phantom of the Opera (2004 film). The orchestra is warm, the singers are close, and the film trusts the music where a plainer director would cut away. The result feels like a recorded performance, which is the point.

The climax on its stage terms (spoilers ahead)

Spoilers follow. The final act compresses the ending into one hard argument. The Phantom forces Christine to choose between Raoul's life and her freedom, and her kiss, given freely to the monster, breaks him. The scene plays with real pain because the film spent two hours insisting these are young people in over their heads.

The coda returns to 1919 and to black and white. Decades later, a red rose and the ring the Phantom pressed into her palm rest on Christine's grave. The last image argues that his love outlived every rule that condemned it, and it lands.

Conclusion: faithful to a fault, and proud of it

The Phantom of the Opera (2004 film) is not a great film by the rules of original cinema, and it is a strong one by the rules it chose: a faithful, sensual record of a stage landmark, carried by a young cast that keeps the melodrama alive. Roger Ebert gave it three of four stars in December 2004, and that measured verdict still fits. Viewers who want the show will find it here, close enough to touch. Those who want it reinvented should keep walking past the mirror.

The premise is simple and loaded. In 1979, a small crew from Houston rents a guesthouse on an elderly couple's rural Texas farm to shoot an adult film, and the shoot goes very badly. West treats the setup as a mirror. The visitors want to be remembered. The hosts cannot bear being forgotten. The collision produces the genre's oldest choreography with a genuinely sorrowful undertow. This connects to our earlier piece, Project Hail Mary (film) showtimes: how the theatrical release unfolded.

What X (2022 film) understands about wanting

Mia Goth plays Maxine, a stripper with a plan, a habit, and a televangelist father whose sermons flicker on farmhouse televisions like a guilty conscience. Goth also plays Pearl, the farmer's wife, under heavy prosthetics. The double casting is not a stunt; it is the thesis. Pearl once looked like Maxine, and Maxine, the film quietly insists, could one day become Pearl.

West stages the connection in plain daylight. Pearl watches Maxine swim in the lake, and her face carries envy, grief, and hunger in a single held shot. Later she stands in the barn while a scene is filmed, imagining herself in the younger woman's place. These moments give the mayhem its weight. When the killing starts, it plays as warped jealousy and grief, not random menace.

The supporting crew is drawn in quick, confident strokes. Wayne, the producer with big dreams, rambles about crossover potential. RJ, the serious young director, defends his artistic intentions even on a porn shoot. Brittany Snow's Bobby-Lynne and Scott Mescudi's Jackson treat the work as work. Jenna Ortega's Lorraine, the shy girlfriend who asks to join the production, carries the film's sharpest irony about respectability.

The farmhouse as a time capsule

X (2022 film) was shot in New Zealand, doubling for Texas, and dressed in 1979 with evident affection: soft rock on the radio, wood paneling, a van that could not exist in any other decade. A24 released the picture in theaters on March 18, 2022, after a South by Southwest premiere, and its polish startled viewers who expected rough grindhouse pastiche. The pastiche is present, but the craft is precise.

The references are worn openly, from Texas Chain Saw weather to Psycho architecture and a Shining-style axe beat. West cites his sources without drowning in them. The score, by Tyler Bates and Chelsea Wolfe, slides from period needle drops into a low drone, as if the farm itself were listening.

Where the violence lands (spoilers ahead)

Spoilers follow in this section. The murders arrive in one long night of escalating cruelty. RJ, trying to drive away and strand the group, rebuffs Pearl's advance and is stabbed in the neck and beheaded. Wayne steps on a nail and takes a pitchfork through the eyes. Jackson is shot by Howard. Bobby-Lynne is pushed into the lake and taken by the alligator the film has shown circling since early on. Lorraine, locked in a basement beside a hanging corpse, breaks out only to be shot at the front door.

The infamous scene lands differently from all the rest. Pearl undresses and climbs into bed beside the sleeping Maxine, caressing her, and Maxine wakes to the face of her own future. It is frightening and pitiable at once, the film's whole idea compressed into one bed. The finale, in which the recoil of her own gun breaks Pearl's hip and Maxine reverses a truck over her head, is nastier and stranger than a victory lap. The closing reveal, that Maxine is the preacher's daughter heard on every television, reframes the story as an escape from one kind of performance into another.

The discipline underneath the blood

West edited the film himself, and the control shows in the long daytime stretch between arrival and death, where dread builds through glances rather than stings. The first hour is patient and the last half hour is ruthless. X (2022 film) is, above all, a director's picture, and the cast meets it at every turn.

Conclusion: a slasher that cuts both ways

X (2022 film) reaches for the full weight of its characters' fears and, more often than not, touches it. The movie is not as radical as its loudest admirers claim, nor as cynical as its detractors fear. It is a craftsmanlike horror picture with a sorrowful heart, a wicked streak, and a post-credits teaser that promised the prequel Pearl before most viewers knew it existed. For a story about people desperate to be watched, it argues that being remembered is the only survival that counts.