Martijn

This is not a very exciting film. It is about two schoolfriends who grow apart, with one becoming a yakuza and another a business man. When the leader of the crime family dies a succession war ensues and both men meet each other again. There's too much focus on the internal battles in the yakuza clan, with the usual ridiculous amount of characters and sub-plots, to make the film really work as a drama about the relationship between the two men and the yakuza spend to much time negotiating instead of killing each other to make the film work as a yakuza film. This was probably an attempt at making a film that works at both levels, like Martin Scorcese can do, but it fails at both, although there are some good scenes.

This is insanity on celluloid. The story is set in a future in which adults have grown so sick of rebellious teenagers one class is send to an abandoned island each year where they have three days to kill each other until there is only one survivor. If after three days more than one kid is alive, they'll be blown up all. This all under the 'Battle Royale' law. It's SURVIVOR, including the romances and gossip, with machineguns. Paul Verhoeven's dark future satires like 'Robocop' and 'Starship Troopers' are the best comparisons (although 'Dawn of the Dead' comes to mind too) but BR is even more violent and, if you like your humour very black, funnier. The best jokes involve Japanese superstar Takeshi Kitano as the bullied teacher who strikes back as the referee.

This is one of the most beautifully filmed movies I've seen in my life. One of the weirdest too. The basic plot is simple: eccentric (or maybe just insane) Nikolai Petrovich comes to St. Petersburg to overthrow the oligarchy. The oligarchy doesn't like that and sends its agents after him. Bashirov, however, tells the story in what are basically a bunch of absurd sketches kept (barely) together by a bombastic, 19th century style voice-over. Some sketches are quite good if you're into absurd humour, but a lot of them are not, often because of Bashirov's own overacting. And they don't connect too well, making the film hard to understand sometimes, but that's probably on purpose.