Directed by Kinji Fukasaku • 2000 • Japan
Starring Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Takeshi Kitano

Stunningly subversive and explosively controversial, Kinji Fukasaku’s still-shocking vision of the adolescent experience as literal bloodsport has taken its place as one of the definitive cult films of the twenty-first century. In a totalitarian future Japan, the government has responded to a rise in juvenile delinquency by instituting a yearly bloodbath in which fifty high school students are relegated to an island, armed with weaponry, and commanded to kill one another until only one is left standing. From this outré premise (so provocative it was not distributed in the U.S. for over a decade), Fukasaku fashions a tour de force of startling brutality and savage social insight.