Reseñas de la crítica

It eventually sinks into the kind of dead-end realization that most of these films reach, that grim anti-epiphany that escape is not possible and that death is the only release from a life of crime. But even so the film never plays this understanding for miserable reflection but callous dark comedy.

Kitano's style—which makes extensive use of off-screen action and sound—gives off a vibe that's one part sincere melancholy, one part absurdist nihilism.

Each movie becomes one long Kuleshov experiment. Or a Bresson action-comedy. For me, the thrill of watching a Kitano film like Sonatine, perhaps the best example, derives from the tension between my near complete sympathy for one or two of the principal characters—partly, or even largely, because I am able to invest the blank characters with my own feelings—and my sense that those laconic, mysterious characters, like me, will forever remain indecipherable, wholly other.

Kitano has made a film so deceptively careless that its deeper qualities can be easily overlooked. The dialogue is either emphatic or deflective – take your pick. Kitano concentrates so much on faces, but they never show us much, at least not what we expect... Kitano directs, writes and edits the film. And he stars. His face has been called "granitic" in its avoidance of facile expression. But the face expresses the same deadpan ferocity as the film.

Kitano, an inventive and compelling visualist, essentially stops the story and creates a series of spellbinding images and set pieces that are so poetic one hardly notices the dangling narrative.

Even if you're like me and find Kitano's films relatively empty apart from his self-parodic macho stoicism and quizzical style, these qualities alone provide quite an eyeful and earful; preternatural quiet and stillness alternate with flurries of loud violence in a singular manner, and the colors and compositions are riveting. The deadpan humor is somewhere east of Harry Langdon and north of Jacques Tati, though far from humanist.