7 Best Movies to Watch by Hidetoshi Nishijima

In Drive My Car, a widowed artist travels to Hiroshima for his latest production. There he meets a young woman enlisted to drive him around the area. They forge an unexpected bond and soon share pithy observations and long-buried secrets, which culminate in a touching scene of catharsis and forgiveness.

Not a lot is said in this three-hour film, but when words (and signals) are shared, they are always underlaid with simple but transcendent truths. Drive My Car is a gripping film that explores love and loss in its own quiet way, at once intense and intimate.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Ahn Hwi-tae, Ahn Hwitae, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Hiroko Matsuda, Jin Dae-yeon, Masaki Okada, Park Yu-rim, Perry Dizon, Reika Kirishima, Ryo Iwase, Saki Suzuki, Satoko Abe, Shoichiro Tanigawa, Sonia Yuan, Toko Miura, Toshiaki Inomata, Yoshinori Miyata

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Rating: Unrated

Surreal, strange, yet wondrous, Penguin Highway never takes a straightforward approach to its story. Penguins pop up out of nowhere, leading the nerdy and precocious Aoyama to study them via empirical observation and logical deduction. These studies don’t end up with a feasible explanation– in fact, by the final act, the film abandons all laws of physics. But the journey to that act feels intuitively right. This journey feels like an indescribable formative experience. Aoyama may be obsessed with growing up and committing to the reasonable adult mindset, but he is still a child. From fending off bullies to forming connections with others, his childhood imagination served him better than science could. The film reveres this discovery as well as it should.

Genre: Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

Actor: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Kana Kita, Landen Beattie, Mamiko Noto, Megumi Han, Miki Fukui, Misaki Kuno, Naoto Takenaka, Rie Kugimiya, Winston Bromhead, Yu Aoi

Director: Hiroyasu Ishida

Rating: Not Rated

In what was originally intended to be his final film, Hayao Miyazaki is at his most lucid with The Wind Rises. Fluid and luminous, it cleanly moves between a grounded, historical reality and an intuitive, imaginative dreamscape. Here Miyazaki reflects on the process of creation and what it means to be an artist, drawing parallels between his own meticulousness as a filmmaker with Horikoshi’s immutable passion for flight and efficient design.

But questions of responsibility and duty arise, as Horikoshi—and by extension, Miyazaki—must reckon with the reality that even things as beautiful as aeroplanes can be destructive, and that even dreams can be violent. This meditative film does not offer any easy answers but it provides solace in its prevailing sentiment: The wind is rising, we must try to live.

Genre: Animation, Drama, Family, History, Romance, War

Actor: Hayao Miyazaki, Hideaki Anno, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Jun Kunimura, Kaichi Kaburagi, Keiko Takeshita, Mansai Nomura, Martin Short, Masahiko Nishimura, Miori Takimoto, Mirai Shida, Morio Kazama, Sascha, Shinobu Otake, Stephen Alpert

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Rating: PG-13

Although this adaptation of the 1960s TV show feels like four episodes of material crammed into a feature runtime, Shin Ultraman really does squeeze as much as it can out of every scene, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. Not only are the action scenes as ridiculous as they should be—still imitating the clunkiness and the theatricality of classic Japanese tokusatsu—but even sequences of exposition are made to feel urgent and breathless by breakneck comedic editing and by placing the camera in the weirdest positions for the quickest shots. And somehow, Shin Ultraman still doesn't feel like it's making fun of its source material. It's an honest-to-goodness sci-fi superhero movie that's much more insightful about the nature of international crises than Hollywood tends to be.

Genre: Action, Science Fiction

Actor: Akari Hayami, Bin Furuya, Daiki Arioka, Hajime Yamazaki, Hideaki Anno, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Issey Takahashi, Keishi Nagatsuka, Kenjiro Tsuda, Koichi Yamadera, Kōji Yamamoto, Kyūsaku Shimada, Masami Nagasawa, Ryo Iwamatsu, Soko Wada, Takumi Saitoh, Tetsushi Tanaka, Toru Masuoka, Yutaka Takenouchi

Director: Shinji Higuchi

Rating: NR