"Actor: Kayoko Kishimoto"

• Hana-Bi | DVD | (19/02/2001) from £13.59   |  Saving you £6.40 (47.09%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The ideal starter movie for those who wish to familiarise themselves with the work of the paradoxical Japanese auteur, Hana-Bi (the word means "fireworks" in Japanese) is an echt example of "Beat"'s Takeshi Kitano's distinctive brand of existential crime thrillers. Like Violent Cop, Boiling Point, Sonatine or his LA-set Brother, Hana-Bi juxtaposes shocking bursts of violence with reflective moments of lyricism, setting up a slap-caress-slap rhythm that's as disquieting as it is addictive. Kitano himself plays weary Tokyo cop Nishi, an impassive-faced detective in hock to yakuza mobsters, toughened by a career in violence (at one point he takes out an attacker's eye with a chopstick, an assault so swiftly edited one barely has time to register it). Nishi's Achilles-heel is his love for his wife Miyuki (Kayoko Kishimoto) who is dying of cancer, following their late daughter to the grave. When Nishi leaves a stakeout to attend to her in hospital, a colleague, Horibe (Ren Osugi) is paralysed in the ensuing shootout. Nishi, guilt-stricken, goes on the run with Miyuki, taking her to beauty spots to enjoy simple pleasures like kite-flying and picnics before she dies, although the yakuza are never far behind. Meanwhile, Horibe takes up painting, and discovers in the process a calming new vocation (the na&239;ve, disturbing and strangely beautiful images are by Kitano himself, painted after he had his own near-fatal experience in a motorcycle accident). The cumulative effect is a profoundly moving and enigmatic movie, one that discreetly withholds many of the narrative crutches--backstory, motivation--you would expect from a conventional Hollywood movie with the same story. It's not surprising Kitano is so drawn to characters teeming with contradictions, given that his own career seems so bi-polar on paper: he started out a television presenting clown, and his move into glowering policiers represented an image volte-face as surprising to Japanese audiences as it would be if Dale Winton had started making Scorsese-style gangster movies. His comic sensibility shines through in spots in Hana-Bi, even more so in the broad comedy Kikujiro. Considered by many critics Kitano's best film, Hana-Bi^'s power is augmented by Hideo Yamamoto's lapidary cinematography, and Jo Hisaishi's lush, string-laden score. --Leslie Felperin

• Hana-bi (Fireworks) | Blu Ray | (11/01/2016) from £17.05   |  Saving you £2.94 (17.24%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Nishi leaves the police in the face of harrowing personal and professional difficulties. Spiraling into depression, he makes questionable decisions.

• Kikujiro | DVD | (26/09/2005) from £9.43   |  Saving you £6.56 (41.00%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Masao (Yusuke Sekiguchi) is a nine-year-old boy who is desperate to locate his long-lost biological mother. Abandoned by all of his friends for the summer holidays and with no one to accompany him on his quest Masao is left in the care of layabout yakuza goon Kikujiro (Kitano) who doesn't like children at all least of all demanding nine-year-old boys. Over time man and boy develop a fondness for one another embarking on an adventure of sorts through the Japanese countryside to find the long-lost mother... Japanese actor/writer/director Takeshi Kitano is perhaps best known to international audiences for his violent and stylish crime flicks Violent Cop and Sonatine. For this film he takes a change of pace to write direct and star in a comic road movie about a magical friendship between a middle-aged man and a little boy.

• Takeshis' | DVD | (08/03/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Japanese cult anti hero Zatoichi is back in a sword-fighting adventure written, directed and starring Takeshi Kitano.

• Kikujiro | Blu Ray | (22/02/2016) from £17.05   |  Saving you £2.94 (17.24%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A story of the friendship between a small boy and a washed-up yakusa. When young Masao (Yusuke Sekiguchi) discovers a picture of his long-lost mother at his grandmother's house, he decides to leave the city and go in search of her. Travelling with the lazy, small-time gangster Kikujuro (Kitano), Masao's journey gets off to a bad start when the pair lose all their money at the racetrack and are forced to continue on foot. As their journey develops, and as they reach their final destination, the pair begin to appreciate that the most important thing about their quest has been the time they spent together.

• Dolls | Blu Ray | (14/03/2016) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The first story concerns a young executive who left his girlfriend in pursuit of a career. Following a failed suicide attempt, he runs to his former love's side and now they roam the country together, bound by a red cord, in search of something they have lost. The second is about an ageing yazuka who also abandoned his girlfriend for the sake of success. 30 years later, he is compelled to return to the park where they used to meet. The final tale is of a former pop star who becomes a recluse following a disfiguring accident. One day, one of her greatest fans comes to prove the extent of his devotion to her

• Dolls | DVD | (24/11/2003) from £9.32   |  Saving you £10.67 (114.48%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Dolls is a film of extraordinary beauty and tenderness from a filmmaker chiefly associated with grave mayhem and deadpan humor. That is to say, this is not one more Takeshi Kitano movie focused on stoical cops or gangsters. The title refers most directly, but not exclusively, to the theatrical tradition of Bunraku, enacted by half-life-size dolls and their visible but shrouded onstage manipulators. Such a performance--a drama of doomed lovers--occupies the first five minutes of the film, striking a keynote that resonates as flesh-and-blood characters take up the action. The film-proper is dominated by the all-but-wordless odyssey of a susceptible yuppie and the jilted fiancée driven mad by his desertion to marry the boss's daughter. Bound by a blood-red cord, they move hypnotically through a landscape variously urban and natural, stylized only by the breathtaking purity of light, angle, color, and formal movement imposed by Kitano's compositional eye and rigorous, fragmentary editing. Along the way we also pick up the story of an elderly gangster, haunted by memories of the lover he deserted three decades earlier and generations of "brothers" for whose deaths he was, in the accepted order of things, responsible. Another strand is added to the imagistic weave via a doll-like pop singer and a groupie blinded by devotion to her. This is a film in which character, morality, metaphysics, and destiny are all expressed through visual rhyme and startling adjustments of perspective. It sounds abstract--and it is--but it's also heartbreaking and thrilling to behold. Kitano isn't in it, but as an artist he's all over it. His finest film, and for all its exoticism, his most accessible. --Richard T. Jameson