Rinko Kikuchi returns to the screen as a grieving widow rediscovering ballroom dance in Josef Kubota Wladyka's third feature, Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!, which premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and opens in theaters on September 25.

The Film Stage's review, published as part of its Sundance coverage, designates the film a Critics' Pick and calls it "a true crowdpleaser" that "carries the rarest maturity about sex, love, grief, and allowing yourself to take life one step at a time."

Kikuchi plays Haru, known as Ha-chan — sequined, septum-pierced, afro-permed — who shares her life and her dance card with her Mexican partner Luis, played by Alejandro Edda. The cross-cultural couple dominates Tokyo's ballroom floors, captured by cinematographer Daniel Satinoff in sweeping slow motion and acceleration. Then Luis dies in an accident, and the film's breezy opening gives way to a study of bereavement.

The review praises this turn as "Pixar levels of an emotionally efficient intro." Haru, newly bereaved, skips her own 46th birthday party. Luis' Mexican family disagrees about what to do with his body. Outnumbered, Haru retreats into grief without an outlet — until her friends Hiromi and Yuki, played by variety show star YOU and Yoh Yoshida, push her back toward dancing. A new instructor has arrived in town.

That instructor is Fedir, played by Alberto Guerra, and Wladyka's film "begins to step into its own" with his arrival, according to the review. Every romcom trope gets hit, but the gaze is "unapologetically — sometimes even aggressively — female." Fedir is married and non-monogamous; Haru is messy, juggling grief with the differing expectations of courtship across cultures. The reviewer argues these elements could sound "exasperatingly Sundance" on paper but instead amount to character writing that is "not only thoroughly modern, but refreshingly honest."

Kikuchi's performance anchors the film. The review calls her "magnetic — a self-possessed performance that reads as emotionally whole, startlingly present, and alive." Wladyka, the reviewer notes, made the film with his own Japanese mother in mind, allowing Kikuchi to lead while the film follows. A film that hands the floor to a Japanese woman's sexuality "so uncompromisingly and empathically," the review states, "feels nothing short of revelatory."

Luis remains present — literally. He appears to Haru as a costumed chibi mascot resembling a crow, watching over her as she stumbles through her next steps. The reviewer admits the device initially raises alarm bells as "a little too Everything Everywhere All at Once" but concludes it feels closer to Apichatpong Weerasethakul once it clicks. The crow represents death, but as the review puts it, "death needn't appear scary and threatening when the deceased is someone you love." The mascot barely fits through the house's doorways; Ha-chan must learn to let go.

Wladyka's references extend across the history of dance on screen. The film nods in ethos to Masayuki Suo's classic Shall We Dance? — the studio space that served as self-discovery for Koji Yakusho's salaryman becomes a site of self-rediscovery for Haru. A play-within-the-film sequence reimagines Dirty Dancing as a Japanese-stage musical, echoing the metatextual pleasures of earlier Ryusuke Hamaguchi works. A station boardwalk brawl, triggered by racist aggression, unfurls into a Broadway-style dance number à la La La Land.

The film's structure, broken up by Tarantino-like title cards, lends it a graphic novel flair as Haru's life enters a fresh chapter she isn't ready to claim.

For audiences weighing a September trip to the cinema, the review's verdict is unambiguous: Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! is a film in love with its artistic inspirations and with "the way we look at each other and ourselves when our hearts ignite and we feel our feet start to move on their own again."