It’s pretty amazing when you consider Tokyo Tribe was adapted from a manga series, since the identity of the story seems forged into the flesh of the music.

| Jun 6, 2024

No one injects more insanity and ideas into their films on a moment-by-moment basis the way Sono does.

| Original Score: 8/10 | May 24, 2019

Outwardly frivolous, frenetic and fueled with a bizarre combination of opulence and outlandishness, Tokyo Tribe will indeed stimulate the senses with its hodge-podge of hedonistic heft in the realm of instantaneous insanity.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 9, 2018

What makes Tokyo Tribe ultimately unique, if still problematic in its sheer amount of chaos, are the underlying politics.

| Original Score: B | Mar 12, 2016

One of the joys of Japanese cinema is how it not only wholeheartedly embraces genres, but also happily mixes them up.

| Nov 11, 2015

Even to call it a perverted ultra-violent dystopian Japanese gang war hip-hop musical, while covering all the bases, would miss what makes the film so indelible.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 30, 2015

The nearly two-hour run time starts to feel like a concert where the hype men won't get off the stage.

| Original Score: C+ | Oct 26, 2015

There's a strange power to Sion's filmmaking that goes beyond the midnight-movie oddness of the plot. He likes the silly and the strange, but he has the style of a Spielberg; he can work wonders with a camera and make the dumbest ideas work.

| Oct 25, 2015

It's as if the American hip-hop culture has been fully lost in Japanese translation and skewed as something cartoonish.

| Oct 23, 2015

It's an infectiously over-the-top and unquestionably idiosyncratic mess, but it only holds together for as long as you're impressed by its commitment to an admittedly novel premise.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 23, 2015

The novelty wears out long before Tokyo Tribe is over. That's because there's nothing really happening here except for the execution of the novelty.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 22, 2015

The cumulative effect ... is numbing.

| Oct 22, 2015

Masquerading as a hip-hop martial arts musical, Tokyo Tribe is mostly just a puerile male fantasy come to hypercolor life.

| Original Score: 4.6/10 | Oct 22, 2015

The novelty factor fades midway through, and not even the bizarre sight of a (computer-generated) tank rolling down the streets and bombing buildings could really sustain or amplify the flagging energy of it all.

| Oct 16, 2015

so insistently over-the-top from the start that the results are just fairly amusing when they ought to be exhilarating.

| Oct 16, 2015

...Tokyo Tribe plays as a gleeful, explosive phantasm of color and energy.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Oct 7, 2015

With its gonzo martial artistry, hip-hop performance, hyper-stylised cinematography and production design, and brazenly dumb throwaway gags, the film is often almost as fun as it sounds.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 27, 2015

If it's too loud (or too fast, or too weird) you're too old.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 21, 2015

Sono's hyper-kinetic high jinks will not be to all tastes, but this promises and delivers a quintessentially Japanese level of insanity.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 21, 2015

Kung-fu hip-hop musicals don't come along very often, and having seen this one, I'm quite glad about that.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 21, 2015