80 is the new 60! With healthcare improving and human longevity increasing, it’s a golden age for the Medicare-eligible filmmaker — in the last decade, we’ve had octogenarian triumphs in films like Killers of the Flower Moon, The Boy and the Heron, and Ex Libris: The New York Public Library. “But what of the nonagenarian?” The occasion of a new Yoji Yamada film, director of over 90 movies and himself 94 years old, gives us the opportunity to ask. Clint Eastwood proved a 90-year-old could make an elegant, Fleischerian film with Juror #2 in 2023. Equally ambiguously (or tersely) titled, does Tokyo Taxi match Juror #2’s twilit grace?
Not being fully fluent in the director’s previous work, this writer finds it difficult to say whether Yamada’s choices in Tokyo Taxi amount to late style — but it sure smells like kareishū. The cuts are hard, the frames are mostly static, and the story is as lean as could possibly be: Koji, a taxi driver in a financially precarious situation, reluctantly picks up a gig driving aging Sumire from Tokyo to a nursing home in Hayama, discovering her rich personal history along the way. A direct remake of the 2022 French film Une Belle Course and featuring distinct notes of Driving Miss Daisy and The Intouchables, Yamada transposes the odd-couple dynamic onto contemporary Japan as seen from the backseat of a cab — and rides the fine line between tastefully simple and perfunctory all the way to the film’s conclusion.
Two people in a taxi can absolutely produce movie magic. Kiarostami and Panahi have both done it in Ten and Taxi, respectively, evincing deep humanity by way of seemingly superficial conversation or the shifting of a gaze. Yamada, however, plays things broad: characters sigh and pout histrionically, eyes bulge when surprised, and the mundanity of the conversation remains just that — mundane. The film doesn’t coalesce into a testament to the beauty of a life well-lived (“In life, the most unimaginable things happen,” Sumire muses as if narrating a commercial for Disney World), nor does it offer a lived-in depiction of Tokyo circa 2026. It’s more comfortable hanging out in the car than being in the world, and any community that pokes in from the sidelines feels incidental. While far from a tourist’s picture, the cutaways to the city’s skyline don’t give the viewer anything to hold onto vis-à-vis Tokyo’s current state or the changes it has undergone over the course of Sumire’s long life.
To compensate for his lack of insight in the present tense, Yamada punts his observations about Japan’s past to flashbacks — functionally half of the movie. Interesting in the sense that a lot of things have happened to her, but never really placing us there with her, they mostly observe from the middle distance her melodramatic turns of fortune. The flashbacks recover from a heinous beige overlay Yamada implements when he introduces the structure, but they never inject the movie with spark, surprise, or verve.
Except once. From thin air, Yamada manages to turn Tokyo Taxi into a completely different film for a single shot. With deep focus and featuring several planes of action, it’s an image distinctly recalling Ozu: a boy plays with his toys while his disinterested stepfather reads the news and his mother (a young Sumire) does laundry behind them. Framed inside of a narrow doorway, we get an entire family dynamic in extreme microcosm. It’s a gorgeous, complicated image, but as if to dissuade us from hoping the movie we’re watching would continue down that path, the stepfather closes the door on the shot and the hope of any invigorating style to be found elsewhere in the movie.
Tokyo Taxi is, ultimately, more aligned with late-career curios Disclosure Day and Ella McCay than it is the tradition of Yasujiro Ozu: Yamada leans back in his rocking chair, waxing poetic about how far we’ve come since he was young and how much farther we’d be if we could just love our neighbors a little more deeply. He deserves credit for prioritizing the small trials and victories of everyday people — it stands as a testament to the durability of quaint humanism, a notion (one hopes) there will always be an audience for. But everyone has a sob story; it’s the telling that matters.
Published as part of Japan Cuts 2026 — Dispatch 1.
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