Popular reviews

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 5

  "My dream is to die."
  "Your fate is sealed."

  Inky, sweaty yakuza fetish noir. 90 straight minutes of pure cinema deathdream and psychological/sexual 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 that 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 Karst ★★★★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 ✝️ ★★★★★ 22

  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 reibureibu ★★★★★ 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 Ethan Colburn ★★★ 1

  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 Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★ 12

  Action! - The Way of the Yakuza: Suzuki's Irreverent, Jarring and Illogical Brand

  The turning point in the director's career. In a way, it will represent a transition in the director's style, as moving forward, he will be gunning for a more avant-garde and experimental approach, which we've seen him dabbling with for a while, but from now on, he will go all in. It was also the last film produced and distributed by Nikkatsu, who had previously released nearly all of his films, for a variety of reasons, including the director's new style, some financial conflicts between the two, and the fact that he had done about everything they had forbidden him to do. And winning cures everything; losing…

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 7

  1967 was a hell of a year to be an underworld assassin -- this and le samourai are more or less what every single hitman film has tried to be (i.e. rip-off) afterwards. suzuki is like a slightly more pleasurable version of godard here -- the noir genre is taken right up to the point of parody, using its iconography as pop-art rather than narrative convention, and the masterful command of the B&W nikkatsuscope frame lends to camerawork that's lyrical without being abstract; i was surprised at how legible most of this was, it feels very contemporary and accessible while still being raw, just the right amount of sleaze and violence to please any lover of off-beat genre cinema.

  
  more thoughts here.

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  Review by Ayush ★★★★ 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 theironcupcake ★★★★½ 16

  “Tell me your ranking.”

  Mini-Collab w/ Rob
  Noirvember #8

  Kill or be killed. The characters who inhabit the monochrome world of Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill are animals, all trying feed the same hunger for violence, sex or actual food that their basic instincts for survival guide them towards. “Beast needs beast,” exclaims Mami Hanada (Mariko Ogawa) in the throes of passion; her chipmunk-cheeked husband Gorô (Joe Shishido) is on the same page, though don’t expect to hear those words from his lips when he prefers show over tell with her. But whatever he feels, whenever he feels it, it’s that uncontrollable, undeniable urge.

  I got more or less the sensation that I did when watching Melville’s Le Doulos for the first…

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  Review by KYK 1

  Lol absolutely bonkers. There's, like, no continuity or coherence, especially in the action sequences... things just CATCH ON FIRE and shit. Also I thought I had a fetish for boiling rice but damn.

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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…