‘Kubi’ Review: Japanese Master Takeshi Kitano Disappoints With His Vicious Samurai Epic — Cannes Film Festival
deadline.comIn the early ’90s, Japan’s Takeshi “Beat” Kitano was on a roll, with a superb string of nuanced crime movies that stood in stark contrast to the good-vs.-evil bullet operas that were coming out of Hong Kong at the time.
Kitano’s darkly funny cynicism (who else could have made Violent Cop?) made him stand out by miles, but it soon became his weakness, as became evident in the lean period after the success of Zatoichi in 2013.
The experimental, semi-autobiographical trilogy that followed — Takeshis’, Glory to the Filmmaker and Achilles and the Tortoise — seemed to offer little more than self-sabotage, the work of a frustrated artist trying to take a blowtorch to his populist image without much thought for the future.
The collateral damage was his international reputation, which took a hit to the extent that his next trilogy, the Outrage series, generally was received as the half-hearted work of a bored auteur.
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