Gonin

Get Carter meets Heidegger in this slick, two-fisted gangster epic brimming with furtive sex and shocking violence. The film centers on five poster-boys of Japan's post-bubble economic malaise: Bandai (Koichi Sato), the owner of a once popular nightclub who's up to his fashionable lapels in debt to ...more

An unflinching gaze into the abyss, Gonin is a savage, stylish, and thoroughly absorbing work that starts as a crime thriller but morphs into a jet black exploration of death, loss, and meaning. The film's gangster flick set up -- a quintet of disenfranchised losers take out a yakuza office-- dispenses with genre formula by the second act: there are no explosions, no likeable characters, and no cathartic confrontations. Instead, there is impending, inescapable doom. As the mob's hitman bears ...more