Remember that scene in Goodfellas where everything is falling apart and Ray Liotta gets offered a job by Robert De Niro that Liotta knows is a set-up to kill him? The same thing happens to Yakuza man Takeshi Kitano in this Japanese crime classic. The difference: Takeshi takes the job, anyway. He’s getting old. He’s tired. Everything’s becoming meaningless to him. He’s got a hard-boiled heart and a face like a rock and he’s not afraid much anymore of death. It’s starting to feel like it’s the last place left for him to go, but not before he takes out a few other people first and has to hide out on a beach where he enjoys some of the simple pleasures in life, such as pranking younger cohorts, playing silly games and brooding. Kitano also writes and directs and he cuts a strange and uncompromising path toward a character study of a gangster burn-out. He’s not afraid of pauses or stillness. Let’s also mention Joe Hisaishi’s music score, a John Carpenter-like blizzard of synthesizers that sounds both vintage and weirdly contemporary today in a world where you can find young bedroom Bandcamp musicians who are all hopped up on old soundtracks. It’s a great movie that bombed in Japan, but piqued Western interest on the film festival circuit. Due its poor reception at home, progress on its broader release was slow and it didn’t hit the American arthouse circuit until 1998.