Brother

...driven by an enigmatic performance from Sergei Bodrov Jr. as the laconic assassin.

Kitano (...) is revered in Japan as an auteur of hard-boiled, minimalist action. His films consist of periods of quiet in which you can feel violence coiling out of sight, and then sudden explosions of mayhem.

...is a gangster film that slow-burns nastiness but, more impressively, critiques with precision...

Balabanov’s Leningrad is full of alcoholics, down-and-outs, decaying apartment blocks and rain-drenched urban wastelands.

It's a startling vision of today's Russia, an unnervingly familiar, crime-ridden vacuum devoid of anything resembling law and order...