The best Taiga Nakano’s movies of 2020

Shuhei is leading a tough life. His alcoholic mother Akiko can only hook up with bad guys and order Shuhei to go get money from his disapproving grandparents instead of going to school. Except raising the little half-sister, his rock-bottom life seems to have no end.

A man is caught on live national TV naked and drunk in the middle of the sacred Namahage festival, where men dressed in ogre-like costumes visit homes to scare kids into behaving during the next year. Tasuku, a young father, is ostracized for shaming the village and its tradition and flees to Tokyo alone. Two years later, he returns to his hometown to make it up to his ex-wife and their little daughter, only to find himself faced with a very difficult situation.

Atsuhisa Yamada is an ordinary man, with a wife and a 5-year-old daughter. He is close to his childhood friend Takeda. One day, Atsuhisa Yamada leaves his office during work hours and goes back home early. There, he witnesses his wife and an unknown man having sex, but Atsuhisa Yamada is unable to express his feelings like anger, frustration, and depression. His relationship with his wife and his friend Takeda becomes distorted.

Set in 1980s Japan, two students transfer into the same school on the same day and become a duo fighting delinquents.

A young bioarchaeologist Yukisuke is attracted to a girl Koyomi, who runs a small stand of taiyaki pastry that he often buys. Koyomi is hospitalized, however, by a car accident on a rainy day after they go out together, and wakes up with short term memory loss, where she cannot remember anything beyond the present day. Yukisuke tries to live close to her as before but the lack of collective memory starts to stagger him.

Kato, a scriptwriter, is in love with Miho—but he can never manage to muster up enough courage to make the relationship anything more than a platonic friendship. Seemingly oblivious to Kato's feelings for her, Miho is always calling him up and spilling her guts about her own love problems. She's in love with someone else, it turns out, but Kato swallows his pride—hearing about it all is almost too much to bear, but he wants to be with Miho as much as he can. In the meantime, the script he's working on for a TV drama mirrors a lot of his relationship with Miho. One day, Kato's friends tell him that his views on love are all mistaken, that he shouldn't delude himself into thinking that his dead-end crush on Miho will go anywhere. Emboldened and motivated, Kato finally decides to tell Miho exactly how he feels.