Yeah, me too. I like McCarthy a lot, especially as he seems to really annoy Roy Keane. And he once summarised a game on MOTD as "we played shite."

It was the brain surgery that did for Ravel. The bump on the head probably didn't help though. Substitute Camus and you've got a hell of a list there.

Sikhs wear headbands now? Good to hear they're finally rocking the Mark Knopfler look.

Michael Madsen: currently appearing in Celebrity Big Brother in Britain. I'm sure we all had high hopes for him 20 years ago.

@avclub-14e4cee178d88fb9aa346dbcc11f2873:disqus  I see your point, but the performance was McKellan's. I mean it in the same way as I'd say, for example, David Tennent's Hamlet. I'd say the diresctor's name when referring to any Shakespeare without the character's name in the title.

If it's anywhere near as good as Brotherhood -and it sounds as if it is- I'm sold.

When I saw the title I knew it wasn't going to be a Western. But, Christ, I really wanted it to be one.

I wish Chinese cinema in general went back to making the kind of films they were turning out in the early nineties, instead of all this nationalistic shit they concentate on now.

It's very different to both. The closest modern Shakespeare adaptation to it I can think of would be McKellan's Richard III. It's very good, not as groundbreaking as Titus, nor as muddled as The Tempest. The Balkan setting works really well, even though it appears a bit NT to begin with. Hell, even Butler's decent in…

No, no, no. She wants to beat the shit out of Tatum O'Neal for some reason.

Christ, yes, those stairs! I'm amazed no-one ever broke their neck on them. It seemed weird that, for example, Volcano Cafe went, but not Wonderbar, that place was seriously rickety. Thanks for straightening me out on that.

I'd heard The Wonderbar somehow survived. If not I'll raise a glass of Speight's to its memory. Terrible news.

I agree with the first three, and I'd add The Flowers And The Angry Waves and Fighting Elegy to the list of great Suzuki films, but they're all made before BTK, which was kind of my point. Pistol Opera I'm not a big fan of, even though I really wanted to like it.

Tokyo Drifter really pulls out all the stops with the finale, but BTK just contributes an hour and a half of jaw-dropping brilliance. The sequence with the hitmen playing a deadly version of The Odd Couple always cheers me up. Shame he never made anything as good again.

What Craig said. If you consider how many films Toho, Daiei, Toei, Nikkatsu, etc were churning out each year -hundreds- the fact that, apart from the prestige productions, so few are known in the West speaks volumes.

No problem, glad to help. I agree that the article was badly thought out with regard to the politics, it irritated me too. And considering the film drives home its ideas with a sledgehammer delicacy it seems bizarre to have written such an off-kilter piece about it.

As someone who lived through the Thatcher years in Britain, saw this at the cinema and discussed it thoroughly I'd say @avclub-a61f27ab2165df0e18cc9433bd7f27c5:disqus (below) has got the political reading of it at the time of its release correct. The Thief was an arch Thatcherite but nobody regarded him as actually…

The pub survived.

When I went to NZ a few years ago I went to Littleton, the town outside Christchurch where the film was shot. Great place, I'd recommend going, but sadly it was levelled in the quake last year.

But Kenny Everett was a Tory Boy. He spoke at their rallies and entertained them with anecdotes about kicking Michael Foot's walking stick away. He wasn't an angry anti-Thatcherite voice in the wilderness, unfortunately.