Japanese actor-director Takeshi Kitano, whose galvanizing crime stories generally live up to their titles (Violent Cop and Fireworks, to name two) and more, threw us for a loop with his last film, 1999's Kikujiro, a decidedly nonviolent man-and-boy road picture. To say he returns to more familiar form in Brother is an understatement. Let's say he returns to more familiar form with a vengeance. Here he plays a taciturn (again, an understatement—Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name comes off like Richard III by comparison) yakuza forced to flee Japan for Los Angeles, where he teaches some local hoods, Omar Epps among them, gangsterdom, Rising Sun-style. Brother represents the apogee of Kitano's sensibility, a dizzying mix of sentimentality and brutality (when I say this film is unbelievably violent, I mean that it actually is unbelievably violent) that brings to mind the great American film roughneck Samuel Fuller. Loud, direct, and uncompromised, Brother is raw red meat in an age of cinematic tofu.