A Sexy Blog

Bill Duke’s Deep Cover wears its neon-lit grime like a badge of honor—a garish, stylized crime thriller dressed up in the trappings of hardboiled noir and early-’90s urban anxiety. If the movie’s mood—the slick rain on Los Angeles streets, the burnished cathedrals of vice, and the snaking synth-and-hip-hop soundtrack—is its raison d’être, then what we get, ultimately, is exactly that: a heady, immersive surface that is always beckoning, yet never really giving.

“Donnie Brasco” is one of those rare crime movies that operates less as a cautionary tale than as an anatomy of yearning—of what we’re willing to counterfeit, and what must finally be, heartbreakingly, real. Directed by Mike Newell (whose touch is lighter than the usual genre brutes), the film plunges us into the rank back rooms and vinyl-upholstered dusk of Mafia New York. Yet what haunts you afterward isn’t the ratcheting tension or the whiff of violence—it’s the look in Al Pacino’s eyes as he walks toward obliteration, and the ache of Johnny Depp’s split, nearly-shattered soul.

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.

Another day, another triad elegy: it’s as if the Hong Kong film industry has some sort of secret contest running—who can churn out the most self-serious underworld operas before anyone in the audience wakes up with genre fatigue. Wong Jing’s “A True Mob Story” arrives trumpeting its authenticity, as if it expects us to genuflect before “the truth,” and then blithely hands us the same old battered deck of loyalty, brotherhood, and doom that’s kept multiplexes in business since the first shirtless gangster picked up a butterfly knife.

With “Violent Cop,” Takeshi Kitano enters Japanese cinema not as a guest but as a one-man demolition squad—a laconic, poker-faced wrecker in a world so morally bankrupt that the cockroaches are considering an exodus. This is neo-noir at its most parched and asphyxiating, the kind of hard-boiled procedural that makes the whole notion of “procedure” look like a quaint bedtime story for children who still believe their parents will keep them safe. Kitano, directing himself with the offhand nihilism of a man who’s read too much Dostoevsky and refuses to be impressed, lets the camera sit and stare, as if daring us to look away first.

Some movies bleed. Some movies howl. And then there’s The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil, which cannonballs straight into the cesspool of our pretensions about right and wrong and dares us to gulp it down. Lee Won-tae’s pit-fight of a thriller isn’t just a crime movie—it’s a baptism, but the water is curdled with blood, sweat, and the stink of men who mistake punishment for penance. This isn’t filmmaking—it’s a bare-knuckle sermon delivered from the gutter.

If you’ve ever felt the jolt of electricity that comes with the first few minutes of a genuinely promising crime film—where the air thickens with possibility and dread—you’ll know something of the elation I felt plunging into Yoon Jong-bin’s Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time. Here is a movie steeped in all the genre trappings: the smoky taverns and smoke-filled back rooms of Busan in the ‘80s and ‘90s, corruption so foul you can almost taste it, men in sharp suits who wield their loyalty like a battering ram—except this time, refreshingly, nothing comes at you in the simple, blunt-force trauma of a cheap triad flick.