Branded to Kill (Criterion Collection)

When Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki (TOKYO DRIFTER) delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually inspired masterpiece to the executives at his studio, he was promptly fired. BRANDED TO KILL tells the ecstatically bent story of a yakuza assassin (Joe Shishido, the chipmunk-cheeked superstar from GATE OF FLESH) with a fetish for sniffing boiled rice who botches a job and ends up a target himself. This is Suzuki at his most extreme the flabbergasting pinnacle of his sixties pop-art aesthetic.