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Pistol Opera
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 8 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 2 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
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.
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database
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...
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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >New York Post V.A. Musetto
There's style and panache to spare. Mournful jazz adds to the mood.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
