Battles Without Honor and Humanity

Fukasaku blows up the honourable-gangster film and replaces it with something closer to the truth. Based on a real Hiroshima yakuza's memoirs, it opens with the atomic bomb and treats organised crime as what grew out of the rubble, a world with no honour left in it, men killing each other over nothing as the freeze-frame captions another anonymous death.

The camera is handheld to the point of assault and there are too many characters to track, which is the point. This is chaos, filmed as chaos.

The first of five in two years. Start here and see how far you get.