1981 • Japan • Directed by Shinji Sômai
A perky high-schooler takes on the mob in Sailor Suit and Machine Gun, a one-of-a-kind genre-bender that riffs on the yakuza film, coming-of-age drama and ‘idol movie’, inventively adapted from Jiro Akagawa's popular novel by director Shinji Somai (Typhoo...
Starring original Diamond Guy, Jo Shishido, Seijun Suzuki's Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! is a hard hitting, rapid-fire yakuza film that redefined the Japanese crime drama. Detective Tajima (Shishido) is tasked with tracking down a consignment of stolen firearms, as the investigation...
Considered by many to be director Kinji Fukasaku's greatest single-film achievement in the yakuza genre, Cops vs Thugs was made at the height of popularity of Toei Studios' jitsuroku boom: realistic, modern crime movies based on true stories taken from contemporary headlines. Returning to the scr...
Burst City is an explosive Molotov cocktail of dystopian sci-fi, Mad Max-style biker wars against yakuza gangsters and the police, and riotous performances from members of the real-life Japanese punk bands The Stalin, The Roosters, The Rockers and INU. In a derelict industrial wasteland somewhere...
The first entry in Takashi Miike’s “Black Society Trilogy,” Shinjuku Triad Society burst into cinemas in Japan in 1995 - and announced the birth of a radical new artist in the world of genre filmmaking. Although he had made his debut in 1991, Miike had worked up to this point in the world of “V-c...
Tetsuya Watari stars in this film as Goro Fujikawa, a yakuza foot soldier who carries out his boss's dirty work. The character was named after Goro Fujita, an ex-gangster turned writer who wrote the original novel. Based on the real life experiences of Fujita, Gangster VIP depicts an unprecedente...
Wherever he goes, trouble follows Goro like a shadow. Continuing in the storyline of its predecessor, the film begins with Tetsuya Watari heading north to Aomori to make amends for his past wrongdoings.
To fulfill a prison mate's dying wish, and to right what is wrong, Goro will kill again. Tetsuya Watari meets his archenemy Shuusuke Shirayama, a rival gangster who also wants to part with the yakuza ways.
New force joins the creators of the Outlaw series in this final installment. Hideichi Nagahara, the scenario writer for A Colt Is My Passport starring Joe Shishido, co-writes the script with Kanao Ikegami. Although Goro is a known assassin, he has always been against the ways of the yakuza. In Ki...
When Okita Isamu (Bunta Sugawara, Cops VS Thugs) re-emerges onto the mean streets of Kawazaki after five years in prison for a string of brutal crimes, he comes face to face with prostitute Kinuyo, who immediately pinpoints him as one of the participants in her brutal sexual assault years earlier...
When Battles Without Honour and Humanity first hit Japanese screens in January 1973, partially inspired by the success of The Godfather, it blasted out a new Ground Zero for crime cinema not only in Japan, but in the rest of the world, and spawned a legendary series that would lead to additional ...
The celebrated Battles Without Honour and Humanity series continues with its second episode, Hiroshima Death Match, setting aside part one protagonist Shôzô Hirono (Bunta Sugawara) to follow a side story showcasing genre icons Sonny Chiba (The Street Fighter) and Meiko Kaji (Female Prisoner 701: ...
Moving beyond the true stories dramatized in the first two episodes of the Battles Without Honour and Humanity series, director Kinji Fukasaku and screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara embark on their most complex narrative yet in Proxy War, a multi-character web of alliances and betrayals set against the ...
Continuing the storyline begun in episode three of the Battles Without Honour and Humanity series, Police Tactics sees director Kinji Fukasaku and screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara further depicting the life-and-death struggle of the gangsters of Hiroshima and Kure, even as the rest of Japan is beginni...
The Final Episode of the Battles Without Honour and Humanity series brought a new, more contemporary mood to the film and its characters. The yakuza may be starting to resemble a legitimate business, but director Kinji Fukasaku, working with new screenwriter Kôji Takada, never lets the audience f...
Bunta Sugawara is Miyoshi, a low-level assassin of the Yamamori gang who is sent to jail after a bungled hit. While in stir, family member Aoki (Lone Wolf and Cub's Tomisaburo Wakayama) attempts to seize power from the boss, and Miyoshi finds himself stuck between the two factions with no honoura...
Nozaki, a labourer who swears allegiance to a sympathetic crime boss, only to find himself elected his successor after the boss is murdered. Restrained by a gang alliance that forbids retributions against high-level members, Nozaki forms a plot to exact revenge on his rivals, but a suspicious rel...
In the second entry, The Boss's Head, Sugawara is Kuroda, an itinerant gambler who steps in when a hit by drug-addicted assassin Kusunoki (Tampopo's Tsutomu Yamazaki) goes wrong, and takes the fall on behalf of the Owada family, but when the gang fails to make good on financial promises to him, K...
Set during the turbulent post-war years, Fukasaku's original 1975 film charts the rise and fall of real-life gangster Rikio Ishikawa (Tetsuya Watari, Outlaw Gangster VIP). Shot through with the same stark realism and quasi-documentarian approach as Fukasaku's earlier Battles Without Honor and Hum...
Miike's 2002 retelling transplants the story to Tokyo at the turn of the millennium. Less a direct remake of Fukasaku's film than a radical reimagining of the same overarching premise, Miike's film captures both the hedonism and nihilism of the modern Japanese crime scene in deliriously stylish f...
Beginning with an explosive, six-minute montage of sex, drugs and violence, and ending with a phallus-headed battle robot taking flight, Takashi Miike's unforgettable Dead or Alive Trilogy features many of the director's most outrageous moments set alongside some of his most dramatically moving s...
