Reviewed by: Keith Hennessey Brown. A story of personal depravity, national racism, and romantic self-sacrifice, Yakuza Graveyard takes its place alongside Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses and Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine as one of the handful of spectacularly graphic and accomplished downward spiral films of 70s Japanese cinema. All the while, a young Spanish woman (Laura del Sol), taken hostage along the way, simply tries to stay alive.

The film may be a comparatively “straight” entry in Lynch’s filmography, but it’s nevertheless a rapturously beautiful and moving art object. Cast: Song Kang-ho, Choi Woo-shik, Lee Sun-kyun, Park So-dam, Cho Yeo-jeong, Lee Jung-eun, Jang Hye-jin, Jung Ziso, Jung Hyeon-jun Director: Bong Joon-ho Screenwriter: Bong Joon-ho, Han Jin-won Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 131 min Rating: NR Year: 2019 Buy: Video, Soundtrack. Finally, there’s a foldout booklet with an essay from Graham Fuller, who contextualizes The Hit as a British gangster film, a road movie, and a philosophical character study. We soon learn, though, that Dave isn’t much of a hero and all that commotion was part of a scam cooked up by Roff and his manager (Wheeler Oakman) to sucker locals into betting their drinking money on Dave, who’s been paid off to take a dive in the second round of an upcoming match with Roff. Not surprisingly, these sensibilities would collide decades later when Cronenberg adapted Ballard’s Crash.

If they act a little confused and a lot self-involved, it’s because they’re artistically pubescent in the best possible sense of the misnomer, and their good looks have you giving them the benefit of the doubt even as you yourself start to approach your ugly, embittered In Praise of Love years or give up on cinema for the third or fourth time. T here are more than enough corpses to fill a cemetery once the smoke clears in Yakuza Graveyard, but in Kinji Fukasaku’s caustic thriller national honor is the central casualty.With Japan’s severe economical crisis spreading across both sides of the law, a shooting can become a transaction—“If you kill someone, you owe damages” is how a drug-addicted prostitute justifies … Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2014. Yakuza Graveyard is a, "Must Have," for Fukasaku fans, and for fans of the Yakuza genre in general. He understands that Merrick’s story is inherently heartbreaking, and frequently ends scenes the second they reach a catharsis, without wallowing in aggrandizing joy or misery. David Lynch’s The Elephant Man belongs to one of the mustiest of genres: the inspirational biopic. Of course, this being Cronenberg, the outcome for him is sure to be less than triumphant. Parker is captured and handed over to two British hit men, who constitute your somewhat stereotypically mismatched pair: experienced, hardened killer Braddock (John Hurt) and overeager tyro Myron (Tim Roth). This segment also contains tantalizing descriptions of one of Lynch’s most famous unrealized screenplays, Ronnie Rocket. The chivalrous Roland represents a code of honor and conduct that stands in pointed contrast to the actions and activities of the British gangsters. Opening with a scene in which Nishida gang members beat up casino guests, shoot a man in a baseball stadium, then get severely abused by cops, Yakuza Graveyard continues at a ferocious pace, as the Nishida and Yamashiro families fight to take over the city.

The commentary track with co-producer Don Carmody, also moderated by Alexander, is a bit more matter-of-fact, yet still covers a lot of interesting ground. Tormented by guilt and embroiled in a literal dead-end affair with a woman he widowed in the line of duty, renegade Detective Kuroiwa (Tetsuya Watari -- Tokyo Drifter) is the one-man definition of "rogue cop." Bong himself has a lively discussion with critic Darcy Paquet, who changes things up for the press campaign-beleaguered director by using free-associative prompts to let him dictate the flow of the conversation. Carmody talks about getting the job as producer, casting a lot of local “wannabes” in secondary roles, his hands-on approach, and his later involvement with a number of cult Canadian genre films. Cronenberg has repeatedly said in interviews that Shivers actually has a happy ending, if seen from the point of view of the parasites. A sign glimpsed in Dr. Linsky’s office reads: “Sex was invented by a clever venereal disease.” This statement of principle uncannily reverses the flow of conventional causality, viewing human behavior as the result of unconscious biological urges, rather than intellect or volition. For this Blu-ray release of The Shakedown, Kino Lorber has sourced Universal’s recent 4K restoration of the film from a 35mm duplicate negative. Witness the scene where a bearded professor type, Dr. Emil Hobbes (Fred Doederlein), murders and then vivisects a young woman, Annabelle (Cathy Graham), dressed like a schoolgirl. This strategy allows us to savor the fleetingness, the value, of each of Merrick’s lovely encounters—especially the extraordinarily moving passages with Treves’s wife, Ann (Hannah Gordon), and the theater actress Madge Kendall (Anne Bancroft)—at the same time as Merrick is allowed to be taken at face value as human. Scorsese’s intros each clock in at less than three minutes and provide key details about a film’s production and restoration efforts. In Requiem for a Dream, there’s nothing going on but style, and ultimately, that just isn’t enough. Requiem for a Dream’s first 30 minutes are some kind of tour de force, exploding out of the gate as the expression of a unique cinematic voice and introducing the stylistic techniques that structure the entirety of the film. Cramped with shootouts, betrayal, and grudges, the screen (and, by extension, society) has no room for the outdated honor the characters yearn for—when the hero and Kaji’s half-Korean moll (an outsider by birth) have desperate sex by the beach, the pounding sea becomes a marvelous reflection not only of the filmmaker’s stylistic fury, but also of the characters’ desire for purification. He’s turned away from jobs that are seemingly available, he engages in prolonged conversations with a white intellectual who uses logic to disguise his racism, and he endures hysterical local propaganda claiming there’s a “black invasion,” all while the local travel agency advertises a “Vacation in black Africa.” Hondo burrows into the madness wrought by systemic racism through various techniques, ranging from animation to interior monologue to montage sequences. The distribution version is a tad washed out compared to the premiere cut, which, as houses the commentary track included on the disc, is effectively presented as the definitive version.

The soundtrack on both cuts is as enveloping as the film’s visual schema, calling particular attention to the retro sci-fi aspects of Jung Jae-il’s eerie, theremin-filled score while keeping dialogue and ambient effects clear in the mix. The end result is less an aching cry for humanity than a torture contraption for willing, masochistic audiences. The interviews that accompany each film are much weightier.