Critic Reviews
73
Metascore
Generally Favorable
positive
19(86%)
mixed
2(9%)
negative
1(5%)
Showing 22 Critic Reviews
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Metascore
Metascore
100
Writer-director-star Takeshi Kitano's 1993 Sonatine, a brutal, brilliant crime thriller about an aging gangster at the center of a maze of double-crosses and vendettas, gives us another look at a remarkable Japanese film artist. [17 Apr 1998, p.N]
88
It shows how violent gangster movies need not be filled with stupid dialogue, nonstop action and gratuitous gore. Sonatine is pure, minimal and clean in its lines.
88
It deserves to be more widely seen as a quite definitive exercise in mob psychology. [17 Apr 1998, p.16]
83
Like the character he plays, Kitano directs the film in a style that alternates between tenderness and brutality, making it a relentlessly tense suspense film one minute and a gentle character study the next. Either half would make Sonatine worth seeing. But taken together as the story of a man who regains his soul but whose face remains permeated with the knowledge of its inevitable loss, it becomes an artful gangster film, Yakuza poetry, and essential viewing.
80
Sonatine, made in 1994, predates the Japanese director's art-house hit Fireworks by three years and is arguably stronger than its successor.
80
Mostly, Kitano is as expressionless as Buster Keaton, but now and then a smile breaks out on that weather-beaten face. He doesn't use much camera movement either, but the combination of understatement and outrageousness is unique, and oddly appealing.
80
Challenging, witty, adventurous and utterly singular.
80
Beautiful and resonant, this provokes deeper thoughts on the nature of living with violence than most gangster films.
80
The picture's uneasy but perfectly calibrated mix of brutal violence and goofy humor is pure Kitano -- the scenes in which Murakawa and his henchmen play a variation on "Rock'em Sock'em Robots" with paper sumo wrestlers is just too bizarre -- and its convulsively nihilistic ending is unforgettable.
80
In his sleek, punchy and altogether captivating Sonatine, Japan's fabled writer-director-tough guy star Takeshi "Beat" Kitano makes it seem as if we've never seen such a tale on the screen. In doing so, Kitano creates one of the most effectively anti-violence violent movies since The Wild Bunch. [10 Apr 1998, p.F10]
