While it is perhaps not as stylistically accomplished as his later Dolls, nor as emotionally gut-wrenching as Hana-Bi, Kids Return is still a charming turn from the reliably idiosyncratic 'Beat' Takeshi.

A most interesting and perceptive film.

**Summary: 7/10: an unforced, wryly funny meditation on failure, and Kitano's most tender work, arguing that a life spent circling is not the same thing as a life wasted.** Two boys ride one bicycle in slow circles around an empty schoolyard. The film opens on that image and returns to it at the end, and everything between is an argument about whether failure is a destination, or merely weather. Takeshi Kitano made this film after nearly, accidentally killing himself. In August 1994 he put a scooter into a barrier in Tokyo and spent months recovering. *Kids Return* was the first thing he directed once he could work. Knowing that, the title stops being a title and becomes a question the director is asking himself with a camera: what does it mean to begin again from a position of failure, and is beginning again the same thing as going backward? The two boys are the answer, split in half. Masaru (Ken Kaneko) is the bully, the ringleader, all swagger and no interior; Shinji (Masanobu Andô) is the follower, softer, more talented, and easier to break. Masaru discovers boxing, gets humiliated, and quits for the yakuza. Shinji stays in the gym and turns out to be good. Their trajectories cross like scissor blades, and Kitano tracks both without ever tipping his hand as to which choice was the wrong one, because neither was, and both were. The performances are the reason it works.…

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