Rating: 
Summary: One of the best films I have seen.
Review: I am fed up with people talking about how kill bill is such a good film. I watched this film about a week after I saw Kill Bill and I honestly think this is the better film. I watched it 3 times. The way Beat' integrates american and japanese culture makes this film standout. The scene where his luitenent plays basketball with one of his brothers friends stands out. Another scene is when they go to attack the mafia, all you see is flashes of gunfire while this young boy is dead in the car. This is a moving film, asides the infruequent gore, You feel a great sympathy for the characters.
Kill bill has no technique at all especially when she is fighting the crazy 88 or whatever. I have seen more technique in Iron Monkey (an old skool martial arts film)The awkward ending leaves you distraught with no hope, but that is the point of the film and 'Beat' portays it that way.
Rating: 
Summary: boring
Review: This movie was really boring. It was slow and uninteresting. the man who did this movie is the one trying to bring back the Zatoichi series. I have not seen the new Zatoichi movie yet but this movie gives me great doubts about how good it will be. His other movies may be good but this one is a definite time waster. Save yourselves.
Rating:
Summary: Very Real and Good
Review: I rented this movie not really expecting much of it. When I started to watch it I found the flow of the movie very appealing to me. It is about an exiled Yakuza that goes to america to live with his brother that he sent to college only to find out that his brother is a street thug drug pusher. The movie then follows along how the exiled Yakuza moves his useless brother and worthless friends up in the ranks of the underworld Yakuza style and their eventual fall in a very realistic way. People are saying that the movie is boring but i think they were expecting the wrong things from it. This movie is not really an action movie anyway. It is very real in the sense of the route some people take and the way they end up because of it. I would say rent it and not buy it although it is a very good movie see it for yourself then decide. Yes the movie is not totally action packed and yes it moves along a slower pace but that realism is actually enjoyable to me rather than seeing constant gun battles for no reason or very stupid fight scenes like the crazy 88's in Kill Bill as another reviewer mentioned.
Rating:
Summary: Kitano Takes Over America
Review: To describe "Brother" as Takeshi Kitano's American directorial debut is like saying Lost in Translation is a Japanese movie. The speaker would be missing the boat totally. In "Brother" we see Japan and America coming to a cataclysmic impact as Yamamoto (Kitano), a Yakuza mobster, is exiled from Japan and forced to live in America with his half-brother. When Kitano finds out that his brother is a small time drug dealer, Kitano takes his brother (as well as his gang) under his wing and turns them into a crime organization to be reckoned with. They take on a mexican cartel and italian mafia alike. However, we see the theme of brotherhood become more of a theme when he and Denny (played by Omar Epps), another small time drug dealer, create a bond that was never attained by his blood brother. Kitano uses light and shadow to punctuate the drama, but the most awe inspiring element to his cinematic vision is the use of silence and stillness. When Kitano is on the screen, sometimes he stands like a statue. The silence in his films are deafening (for a remarkable example of this, I refer to the film "Violent Cop"). With the use of Japanese and English language, we are thrust among the cultural barrier of the gang. However, they are able to circumvent this and become true brothers.
Rating:
Summary: Obtuse synthetic nonsense II
Review: Seriously, the first review with this title nailed it. I saw a different Takeshi Kitano movie a few years back which was much more stylistically interesting (can't remember the name, but it was a Japanese film), so I know he's capable of making an interesting film. This isn't it. This film is a terrible waste of time.
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