Graveyard of Honor

Kinji Fukasaku's nastiest film, based on the life of a real gangster too unstable for even the yakuza to tolerate. Rikio Ishikawa betrays everyone, including his own bosses, in a downward spiral of drugs and violence that ends the only way it can. There is no honour anywhere in it, which is the point.

Fukasaku shoots it with his usual handheld ferocity, and Tetsuya Watari plays Ishikawa as a man with a genuine death wish. It is the jitsuroku style at its most nihilistic, a portrait of self-destruction with no redemption offered.

Bleak, brutal and one of Fukasaku's most uncompromising films.