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Pistol Opera

EMAILPRINTMedia Blasters

Pistol Opera reviews
75
7.5 User Score:

Generally favorable reviews

Based on 8 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

Based on 2 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info

Genre(s): Crime

Written by: Kazunori Itô
Takeo Kimura

Directed by: Seijun Suzuki

Release Date:
Theatrical: June 13, 2003
DVD: June 24, 2003

Running Time: 112 minutes, Color

Origin: Japan

Language(s): Japanese (with English subtitles)

Summary

RATING: Not Rated

Starring Makiko Esumi, Sayoko Yamaguchi, Kan Hanae, Masatoshi Nagase, Mikijiro Hira, Kirin Kiki, Kenji Sawada, Tomio Aoki, and Haruko Kato

In this belated sequel to director Seijun Suzuki's 1967 film "Branded to Kill," a female assassin rises in the criminal underworld.

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

What counts isn't the convoluted plot or exotic characters -- it's the brilliance of Suzuki's cinematic style, articulating the action with eye-boggling color and split-second editing effects.

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90

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

Suzuki has made the ultimate meta-movie, a self-parodying, surrealist gangster daydream as intoxicating and insubstantial as an absinthe swoon.

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88

New York Post V.A. Musetto

There's style and panache to spare. Mournful jazz adds to the mood.

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80

Variety Dennis Harvey

Too abstract and self-referential for the average action fan's comprehension. But buffs will be delighted by a package that finds the near-80-year-old helmer giddily tipping hat to the genre conventions, themes and over-the-top aesthetics that long since lent him mad-visionary status.

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70

TV Guide Ken Fox

The audacious finale, which plays out in a wholly symbolic realm, will leave even the most adventurous moviegoers scratching their heads. See it with a friend; you'll appreciate the second opinion.

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70

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Insanely likable but suffers from anemia.

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60

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

If Pistol Opera turns out to be Suzuki's swan song, instead of just an anticlimactic comeback, no one can claim he didn't go out on his own stubborn terms.

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40

Film Threat Eric Campos

So now that I’ve seen one of “the master’s” films, I still can’t tell you what the appeal is. Pistol Opera is unique for sure, it just never made me want to follow it down its strange path.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this movie is 7.5 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Yoon C. gave it a 7:
Suzuki made exciting rambunctious movies in an exciting rambunctious time in the 60s, when Japan was still climbing out of the chaos of the post-war years. His movies reflected the tensions of a new Japan coming into birth, coming to terms with the fading of the old into history. Suzuki's latest film is trapped in the new and sterile Japan of the present. Like Japan itself, it's all artifice, directionless, just a world of mirrors reflecting itself endlessly to the point of staleness. Still, it's stylistically bold and sure to be worthy of scrutiny from a art designer's perspective. Also, it's nothing like conventional narrative but more like a reverse adaptation of static/plastic arts into time-driven narrative. In other words, if paintings, still photography, sculpture, etc attempt to render the flow of life into a potently charged single moment, this movie takes the charged iconography of gangster ideal and thaws them into something just resembling motion, but not entirely, resulting in a movie that hovers between symbolic iconography and narrative possibilities; in other words, it's the daydream of a gangster movie in the mind of still fertile imagination.

David P. gave it an 8:
a movie that feels like it's impenetrable unless you saw all the japanese gangland movies before it, but, the butoh sequence at the end says maybe these are a few things that it was too early to say in the 60s.

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