Sonatine

Writer-director-star Takeshi Kitano's 1993 Sonatine, a brutal, brilliant crime thriller about an aging gangster at the center of a maze of double-crosses and vendettas, gives us another look at a remarkable Japanese film artist. [17 Apr 1998, p.N]

It deserves to be more widely seen as a quite definitive exercise in mob psychology. [17 Apr 1998, p.16]

It shows how violent gangster movies need not be filled with stupid dialogue, nonstop action and gratuitous gore. Sonatine is pure, minimal and clean in its lines. Read full review

Like the character he plays, Kitano directs the film in a style that alternates between tenderness and brutality, making it a relentlessly tense suspense film one minute and a gentle character study the next. Either half would make Sonatine worth seeing. But taken together as the story of a man who regains his soul but whose face remains permeated with the knowledge of its inevitable loss, it becomes an artful gangster film, Yakuza poetry, and essential viewing. Read full review

Mostly, Kitano is as expressionless as Buster Keaton, but now and then a smile breaks out on that weather-beaten face. He doesn't use much camera movement either, but the combination of understatement and outrageousness is unique, and oddly appealing. Read full review

Challenging, witty, adventurous and utterly singular. Read full review

Beautiful and resonant, this provokes deeper thoughts on the nature of living with violence than most gangster films. Read full review

The picture's uneasy but perfectly calibrated mix of brutal violence and goofy humor is pure Kitano -- the scenes in which Murakawa and his henchmen play a variation on "Rock'em Sock'em Robots" with paper sumo wrestlers is just too bizarre -- and its convulsively nihilistic ending is unforgettable. Read full review

In his sleek, punchy and altogether captivating Sonatine, Japan's fabled writer-director-tough guy star Takeshi "Beat" Kitano makes it seem as if we've never seen such a tale on the screen. In doing so, Kitano creates one of the most effectively anti-violence violent movies since The Wild Bunch. [10 Apr 1998, p.F10]

Sonatine, made in 1994, predates the Japanese director's art-house hit Fireworks by three years and is arguably stronger than its successor. Read full review

Kitano has his problems; for instance, he hasn't quite figured out how to create fully dimensional, interesting women. But at a time when action movies typically hand us a canned experience, his pictures carry a charge of originality. Read full review

Directed with the blend of moody atmosphere and punchy violence that has made Kitano one of Japan's most powerful culture heroes. [10 Apr 1998, p.B2]

The best parts of Sonatine reach into that space where the fear ends and death begins, and find there the music of life. [01 May 1998, p.C4]

The violence in the existential gangster poem Sonatine is as flat and matter-of-fact as the antihero's face. Kitano, the Japanese Harvey Keitel, is a bullplug of a man whose very presence has gravity. [10 Apr 1998, p.048]

Though it never reaches the fever pitch of American gangster films, Sonatine is nonetheless louder than Fireworks, with a little less pathos. It may lack the blind-siding explosiveness of Fireworks, but it still delivers a great emotional punch. [11 Sep 1998]

Kitano treated us to a similarly complex crime drama, Fireworks, but Sonatine (which was made in 1994) is a darker, deeper, more polished work. Read full review

Gross and trite as the material is, Kitano shows again that he is an ingenious, purposeful filmmaker. [27 Apr 1998]

Still, Kitano creates his own scary and compelling world in the film, and there's no denying his charisma as a star. Like Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood (two action icons to whom he's often compared), the 51-year-old actor holds the screen with seemingly no effort. He's as watchable as a tired old rattlesnake. [11 Sep 1998]

If you feel hostile toward art that not only confuses you but then also suggests that your confusion is precisely the point, you'll probably want to pass on Sonatine. But if disciplined, minimalist storytelling, formal innovation, and contemplation of mystery for its own sake appeals to you, a real feast awaits you in the films of Takeshi Kitano. Read full review

Kitano, thankfully, displays the occasional flash of showmanship, and he certainly establishes a unique tone, but troublesome things like plot and pacing don't seem to be to his liking. Read full review

Sonatine is less stylish and affecting than Fireworks. Its deadpan satire becomes indistinguishable from numbing slack as the waiting game is played out.[17 Apr 1998, p.F7]

Sonatine eliminates the one virtue American action films can legitimately claim -- vitality -- and replaces it with fake- existential claptrap wrapped in an inept narrative. Read full review