Tyler Cowen considers his favorite Japanese gangster movie: "Should I go with Sonatine? I don't know them all."
I don't know them all either, but in this category I prefer a different Takeshi Kitano movie, Fireworks -- or Hana-bi in Japanese -- that came out a few years later. There's a small movie theater next door to the building I grew up in that, back when I was in high school showed tons and tons of gangster and martials arts movies from Japan and Hong Kong so I became surprisingly well-versed in these sub-genres.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/05/-em-hana-bi-em/44918/
