TOKYO TAXI

The Ride of a Lifetime

Venue(s): Shinjuku Piccadilly
Shinjuku Piccadilly: December 19 (Fri), 2025 to December 23 (Tue), 2025, Osaka Station City Cinema: July 13 and 14, 2025
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Official website: movies.shochiku.co.jp/tokyotaxi-movie/
Theater website: www.smt-cinema.com/sp/site/shinjuku/
Trailer: https://bit.ly/44UkdOU
Tariff: Please check on the theater site.
Advance tickets: Each Screening: 3 Days Prior at 9:00 PM
Talk event: Please check on the theater site.

Title: TOKYOタクシー (Tokyo Taxi)
Director: Yoji Yamada (山田洋次)
Duration: 103 min

Legendary director Yoji Yamada brings together two of the most beloved actors in the history of Japanese entertainment, Chieko Baisho and Takuya Kimura, for his 91^st film, and they aren’t the only reasons to be sure you see it. While Tokyo Taxi is adapted from the 2022 French film Driving Madeleine, Yamada makes it his own, and does much more with the story than just showcase iconic Tokyo scenery from the taxi windows. It’s now showing for a week with English subtitles — and believe us, it’s guaranteed to move you.

Tokyo Taxi concerns the elegant, upper-class Madame Sumire  (Baisho, Plan 75, Tora-san series), who has hired a car to drive her from eastern Tokyo to a retirement home in Hayama.  Koji Usami (superstar Kimura, of SMAP fame) is an overworked driver and devoted family man who’s worried about paying his talented daughter’s tuition at the school of her dreams.

What begins as another routine shift takes an unexpected turn when Koji finds himself straddled with this 85-year-old woman embarking on what she calls her “last journey.” Sumire insists on making several stops—recognizable places across the city that hold memories of love, loss and unfinished chapters. As the taxi traverses Tokyo and continues southwest, an unlikely friendship begins. As Koji listens to Sumire’s unlikely story — from abused wife to successful business operator, with much in between—what starts as a simple fare transforms into a shared odyssey through memories, regrets and unexpected connection.

Baisho has worked with Yamada since her film debut in 1965 (Kiri no Hata), and here, she demonstrates masterfully just how much can be conveyed from the closed confines of a moving vehicle. As the two characters share their stories over the course of the long ride — from Shibamata (Tora-san’s hometown) to Jingu Gaien Ginkgo Avenue and the Bay Bridge —Baisho is charming but indomitable, feisty but forlorn. And her chemistry with Kimura, who last worked with Yamada on Love and Honor (2006) , is as magical as the ending of the story.

Yamada’s vaunted humanism shines through: Tokyo Taxi observes aging, caregiving, economic precarity,  domestic violence and discrimination against Zainichi Koreans with sensitivity rather than sentimentality. This coincidental encounter of two souls leads to a journey that alters the final destinations of both.

Shinjuku Piccadilly