Popular reviews

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  Review by Karsten Runquist ★★★★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 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 reibureibu ★★★★½ 9

  Ambition kills, and this film is the embodiment of that. We follow Hanada, a hitman working for the Yakuza who occupies an underworld where assassins are ranked. He is #3, one of the best out there, but by virtue this entails a #2 and #1. And so here is a world where everyone is stratified into tiers, people less of people and more pawns in a larger game.

  For many that might as well be what this is, a game of sorts where everyone is pitted against one another and anyone who exists outside of this shadowy sphere mere bystanders who occasionally get hurt in the crossfire. Hanada, like all these other mobsters, is so fixated on the inner machinations…

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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 Stephen G @Fantasia ★★★★ 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 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 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 matthewcutchen ★★★★½

  Completely unrealistic.

  Joe Shishido shoots bullets THROUGH a windshield and the windshield DOESN’T EVEN BREAK.

  It’s like…

  You expect me to believe he can do that and yet was somehow still only ranked the #3 assassin?

  COMPLETELY. UNREALISTIC.

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

  this is what 2020 feels like

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  Review by Graham Williamson ★★★★★ 3

  Part of March Around the World 2016. Today: Japan!

  I haven't seen much Suzuki - only Tokyo Drifter - but I have in my possession a copy of the book Eros in Hell: Sex, Death and Madness in Japanese Cinema. In this book, the following exchange occurs between a French critic and a Japanese director regarding the impromptu musical numbers in Tokyo Drifter.

  Takao Nakano: Seijun Suzuki didn't shoot such scenes in order to make the audience laugh; he did it earnestly to please them. [...]
  Romain Slocombe: French people have recently become interested in Seijun Suzuki. They think his films are parodic comedies.
  Takao Nakano: I see what you mean, because his films could be interpreted in different ways.…