Amazeballs

What does it mean to come of age on the wrong side of the tracks, in an era when a school blazer is both a uniform and a battle flag? Phuttipong Nakthong’s 4 Kings slips us into the fever hallways and bruised afternoons of 1990s Thailand, where vocational schools function as both families and war zones. And the miracle here—the surprise, really—is that the film doesn’t just wallow in nostalgia or gangster-movie clichés; it bristles with anguish, tenderness, and an ache for lost possibilities.

Just when you think you’ve seen every action movie variation—a relentless barrage of bullets, a battered hero bleeding patriotism in the dust, evil men with nicknames like “The Stinger”—along comes Counterattack, a film that throws itself into the jungle firefight with reckless abandon, only to get pinned down by the most familiar artillery in the screenwriter’s arsenal. If the action genre has become the cinematic equivalent of a well-worn pair of combat boots, this international effort polishes the leather but never changes the tread.

If the movies have always been a kind of fever-dream export, then “Brother” is Takeshi Kitano’s midnight shipment—an East-meets-West yakuza odyssey dipped in Los Angeles neon, redolent with the sweet jasmine of gunpowder. Here’s a gangster film that grinds its teeth on the concrete of two cultures, where ritual silence means as much as spilled blood, and loyalty is currency spent and spent again. It’s a picture that, for better and occasionally for worse, gleams with the eccentric fingerprints of Kitano—who, with a gaze as blank as a shut safe and an enigmatic half-smile, turns the genre inside out until the expected comes out looking like a magician’s trick you can’t quite catch.

If Takeshi Kitano ever felt compelled to sign off from the yakuza genre with a blood-red signature, Outrage Coda is it—a film drenched in betrayal, inscrutable silences, and the kind of violence that doesn’t so much escalate as metastasize. Kitano, in his quietly volcanic way, delivers what may be the only logical conclusion to a trilogy built on the tattered flags of honor and revenge: an ending that’s less grand opera than a slow, inexorable lowering of the curtain. If you go looking for the high-def shocks that made the original Outrage sting, you might think you’re being offered leftovers. But here’s the trick: even at his most subdued, “Beat” Takeshi never once lets you forget he’s on screen—weathered, stone-faced, and radiating danger like a knife tucked under a pressed suit.

Beyond Outrage—Takeshi Kitano’s sledgehammer sequel, a movie that swings with both the assured brutality of a mob execution and the abstract rigor of a calligraphic brushstroke. Here, Kitano isn’t merely following up his 2010 "Outrage," he’s detonating its aftermath, spraying the screen with ricocheting betrayals, power grabs, and—like some kabuki bloodletting—splashes of crimson artistry. If "Outrage" gave us an acid bath in internecine yakuza plotting, "Beyond Outrage" is the industrial-strength sequel, boiling the genre down to its ruthless chemical core.

Takeshi Kitano’s Outrage lands not just as a gangster flick but as a battered, blood-soaked ledger of every debt—emotional, familial, plain old monetary—the yakuza world has ever dared to hold. You sit there, braced by the opening scene, and suddenly you’re getting battered from all sides: black suits, bad habits, and a bloodlust that feels as methodical and joyless as balancing the books at a slaughterhouse. Kitano doesn’t ask if you’d like to go for this ride—he locks the doors and throws away the keys. This isn’t the steamy, choreographed violence of American pop-gangster films; it’s a meat grinder, and the only question is how many fingers, arms, and heads will get caught in the gears before it grinds to a finish.