Directed by Seijun Suzuki

Japanese New Wave renegade Seijun Suzuki combined a deliriously inventive approach to filmmaking and a fast-and-loose attitude toward genre expectations to make some of the most thrillingly stylish movies of all time, frequently transcending narrative logic and skyrocketing clear into the realm of total pop-art abstraction. From the anything-goes yakuza thrillers TOKYO DRIFTER and BRANDED TO KILL (a masterpiece so narratively fractured it resulted in his unceremonious firing from his longtime home studio of Nikkatsu) to the daring postwar dramas of human frailty GATE OF FLESH and STORY OF A PROSTITUTE, Suzuki played chaos like jazz, cramming boundless visual ideas into his beautifully composed frames.