Popular reviews

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★★ 4

  "my dream is to die."
  "your fate is sealed."

  inky, sweaty yakuza noir. 90 straight minutes of pure cinema deathdream psychological chaos where corpses fall in and out of frame from every conceivable direction, the heat of the moment seems to set things on fire at random, and horniness and explosive violence are so thoroughly intertwined it can be hard to tell where exactly we are and what's happening. a movie so batshit-stylized the studio literally fired the man when he turned it in lol. at one point the hitman lead escapes the scene of an assassination by jumping out of a window and landing on an unseen advertising blimp and slowly rises in the background of the carnage with him on it like some sort of silent era comedian, and it only gets weirder from there.

  full discussion on episode 146 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

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  Review by karsten ★★★★½ 7

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  just when i thought this couldn’t get any goofier, it ends on the most ‘dear sister’ ending imaginable

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ★★★★★ 15

  Suzuki is one of the most versatile directors of the Noberu Bagu, which is compliment enough, even if he is not necessarily the best. He shifted from noir tributes, to exploitation, to anti-war humanist testaments, to treating themes of prostitution in several ways, to cinematic pulp fiction, to flat-out experimentation. Branded to Kill is the bastard son of the peculiarities of the Japanese New Wave: a crime-oriented plot with magically ranked hitmen including one third-ranked hitman that has an unbelievably cool and equally ridiculous fetish for sniffing boiling rice, a wife that is obsessed with sex and behaves like mentally demented, a Ju-On-like femme-fatale lover that surrounds herself by dead birds and butterflies with eagerness for sex and that water…

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  Review by Ethan Colburn ★★★

  Throw Seijun Suzuki on the list of directors I really wish I connected with more.

  This is artfully done, and I fully understand why it's beloved but I found it awfully dry. While the camera work was well crafted, the editing was often distracted. It borrows a lot from the French New Wave in that its editing isn't invisible. Much of the time I was trying to orient myself to what was happening instead of enjoying what the film has to offer.

  It's by no means a bad movie and has many fascinating sequences but I was hoping for more here. Still the butterfly sequence will likely stay with me for a while.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★★

  “Better than all the other man out together” a dancer tells the title character in Tokyo Drifter and the following year Seijun Suzuki pushed the idea to dark comic heights in a nightmare of macho posturing exploding in violence. It is like Welles’ The Trial had gone wild on phallic imagery.

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  Review by Ayush Das Adhikary ★★★★ 19

  Men posing as Gods of Death in decaying landscapes and monotonous buildings of urban civilisation, acquainted with many a symphonies of gunfire and the corpses they result in. They embrace the idea of ending lives for money before fate inevitably catches up to their big-boy tomfoolery and has them breathe their last breath without a moment's notice. Screaming, crying, but most importantly, begrudgingly befriended with the concept of mortality.

  But what happens when Death is kind enough to announce its impending arrival?

  One man's voyeuristic ecstasy turns into another's claustrophobic nightmare. Gone are the days of swift assassinations, of fucking someone all over the house, of wanting to fuck another but never getting to fulfill the fantasy, or of even…

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  Review by Noah DiVincenzo ★★★★½ 3

  The smell of rice , the sound of jazz , and the silly power of the ego. Totally surreal and unforgettable. One of the weirdest films from 1960’s Japan - influencing so much from Lynch to Jarmusch to even having similarities with French noir. Not your typical crime flick , an absurdity that somehow works so well. The butterfly scene alone is worth the watch.

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  Review by Jonathan White ★★★ 51

  After completely enjoying the 1967 Takashi Nomura film, A Colt Is My Passport, a wonderful continuation of the rich history of other countries adopting the American Western, and making the genre their own, a LB friend recommended another starring chipmunk cheeked Jô Shishido to my film partner in crime wife.

  I walked into this one without any knowledge of its stature or of the history of the director, other than the affectation that it earned a Criterion release. Since watching, I haven’t done my usual perusal of LB friend’s ratings. I have read the Criterion essays included with the disk before writing this.

  When the film was over, I was ready to give it 2 stars. Upon gestation, and before…

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  Review by Stephen Gillespie ★★★★ 5

  Seijun Suzuki's endlessly stylish thriller throws out plot for world building and atmosphere. It is a bold proposition but the lack of narrative constraints allow for endlessly evocative moments. Much of this is visual, fantastic production design - with a cohesive aesthetic - shot in creative ways.

  There is an overt influence of Melville here, with a similar framing of shots and effective use of close-ups. But, there is also a style all of its own, with repeating visual motifs echoing throughout the film underpinning the unique flair of the Japanese gangster film. While many other nations go for operatic grandeur, elegy, melancholy and literary heft with their gangster cinema, this sub genre of Japanese film just knows the idea…

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  Review by PopcornIdeology ★★★★½ 2

  Basically the Japanese version of Le Samouraï

  Everything about this film exudes coolness. From its satirical take on male bravado and the yakuza genre, to its beautifully composed black and white cinematography, Branded to Kill is just simply too fucking cool. 

  What amazes me the most about this film is not only the abundance of themes it is able to adequately touch on for an extended amount of time (the perils of infatuation/obsession, the paradox of a murderer’s death, and the hilarity of ego to name a few), Branded to Kill is also able to capitalize on an impressively vast number of genres from comedy, action/noir, yakuza, drama/thriller, and maybe romance? Deeply entertaining, darkly comical, and infusing absurdism into a narrative that perhaps other directors would keep straight-laced, Suzuki has proven to me in just this film alone that he is worthy of the praise he garnered in Japan and later from the rest of the world.

  9.5 / 10

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  Review by Cory ★★★★★

  "So you have no hope for the future.."
  "My dream is to die."

  I initially watched this late last night and honestly didn't know what to make of it. I knew it was a very different take on the yakuza genre, but I didn't exactly understand it's stylized madness.

  Watching it over made it totally click for me. A deconstructed new-wave odyssey over a seemingly mystical rank of power, Suzuki plays around with the genre to the point of borderline mockery, while always retaining a gritty film noir aesthetic. Nihilistic and abstract tones existing in perfect harmony. Every trope in the book is accentuated to pure, unfiltered satire. A truly ridiculous & unique film.
  
  Chaos never looked so cool.
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  Thanks for reading!✌😎

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  Review by Evan “Kaizō Haya-shill” Pincus ★★★★★ 1

  this is what 2020 feels like