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Takeshi 'Beat' Kitano directs and stars in this brutal crime thriller about a Japanese yakuza forced to flee to Los Angeles after the death of his boss.

In the wake of a failed gang war, Yamamoto ‘Aniki’ (Kitano) arrives in Los Angeles with nothing but a new name and a bag of cash. Re-uniting with his younger brother, he uses his extensive experience as a hardened gangster, to grow a small-time drug operation into an far-reaching criminal brotherhood, attracting the attention of rival gangs with bloodthirsty consequences.

• Presented in High Definition
• The Green Flash (1988, 23 mins): Adam Davis’ short film about an encounter between a runaway and a gangster featuring a young Omar Epps in his first screen role
• Other extras tbc
• **FIRST PRESSING ONLY** Illustrated booklet featuring new writing on the film

The problem, at least for this viewer, is how the picture brightness and contrast have been graded, especially when compared to the close to spot-on grade on the DVD. There's no getting around it, the image here is overly dark, with the result that it sucks picture detail into the often solidly black shadows, and even partially obscures the faces of characters in some scenes. While some might argue that this is intentional, being a visual representation of the film's noir sensibilities, I'm not buying it. We screened this film at the cinema-based film society I used to co-run, and the transfer on the previous DVD was as close as dammit to how the film looked on the big screen. Even without that comparison, however, the grading of the transfer on this Blu-ray just feels off, as the film is clearly not lit to be graded as darkly as it is on this disc.

tenia wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 1:42 pm Haven't all BFI discs been starting for a few years with a disclaimer anyway ?

As usual, these people should ask to get trigger warning about the presence of trigger warnings. I’m also quite amazed that they equate indicating a movie contains depictions of racism and homophobia and that the label disapprove of such behaviors with the movie actively being so (because showing such behaviors is different from condoning them) and that the label stating it’s bad to behave this way means they’re “disapprove of the movie” altogether (which then makes one wonder why they’d release it on BD). The kind of replies that makes me both frustrated and happy being banned from there.

I couldn’t care less about those. Don’t like these disclaimers ? They’re 20 seconds, shorter than some labels’ intros. Drink a glass of water meanwhile, or check what time it is and when the movie will be over, close your shutters or check your email. Anyone of those will do.