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 cumulative effect ... is numbing.

| 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

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

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

This slab of lurid, pervy, blood-soaked silliness from cult Japanese director Sion Sono is kind of a hoot.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 21, 2015

This Japanese hip-hop musical is a wild, at times exhilarating watch - but an exhausting one.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 19, 2015

After the exhilarating shock of the opening this rapidly becomes monotonous and unpleasant.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 18, 2015

this meandering, mediocre film never quite knows what to do with its big, bonkers concept.

| Nov 4, 2014

An often fun, thoroughly brainless movie ...

| Original Score: B | Sep 11, 2014

Sion Sono's film imagines gangs not as rebels without a cause, but a lost generation of displaced, poisoned youths.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 7, 2014