Like a Rolling Stone

Kumashiro's brilliant last film (based on a hard-boiled novel by Kenzo Kitakata) subverts the yakuza genre by creating a new type of anti-hero. Tanaka (Okuda, previously more associated with worthy social dramas) is a cool, high-ranking yakuza despised by his snobbish boss. Bored by his work, increasingly adrift from his own mental moorings, he debauches the girl from the local florist's shop just to give himself something to do and stitches his own stab wounds just to see what it feels like. The tension between this deeply alienated man and his job yields a film of compulsive, cumulative power, much of it shot in long, real-time takes.