Split-cheeked, peroxide-blond, and addicted to pain, Tadanobu Asano's Kakihara is one of the great creations of Japanese extreme cinema, and Ichi the Killer turns him loose. A Tokyo yakuza enforcer, he searches for the missing boss he loved and for the sadist who might finally hurt him enough. His quarry turns out to be Ichi, a weeping wreck of a man conditioned into a human weapon by a manipulator with his own designs. Takashi Miike stages the carnage as nightmare slapstick one minute and tender horror the next, pushing splatter, cruelty, and damaged longing into a single comic-book fever dream. Twenty-five years on, Miike's adaptation of Hideo Yamamoto's manga still operates in a category of one. A NYAFF foundational obsession.