'Crazy Thunder Road': Wild To Be Wreckage Forever

Never before available for English-speaking audiences, Gakuryū Ishii's raw and rousing micro-budget motorcycle mini-epic heralds what was to come in his future films

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'Tokyo Decadence': The Dark Age Of Love

Ryū Murakami's adaptation of his own story about a Tokyo sex worker is noisome social commentary that won't reach anyone who hasn't already gotten the message

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'ODDTAXI': Drive, He Said

This labyrinthine noir about a third shift cabbie grows in unexpected directions, becoming one of the best anime offerings in a long time

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Netflix's 'Cowboy Bebop': A New Jam Session

Lopsided, but still very enjoyable; if this hasn't raised the upper bound for anime-to-live-action, it sure has raised the lower bound

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After all the speculation, all the worries, all the delays, and all the hype, the mere fact Netflix's live-action Cowboy Bebop exists at all is cause for celebration. As live-action anime adaptations go, it's at the high end of the curve, with a game cast, lavish visuals, and all the fun byplay and background details we expect. Its main problem is twofold: it doesn't always know how to translate the underlying material; and it makes explicit much of what was only once implied about its people, thus paradoxically lessening its emotional power. But what does work -- the look of it, the jocularity, the anarchic energy -- is quite nice. If this hasn't raised the upper bound for anime-to-live-action, it sure has raised the lower bound.

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'Cop Craft': An Isekai Lethal Weapon

Your standard cop-buddy story, made only slightly more interesting by having the buddy being a magic-wielding paladin

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Stop me if you've heard this one before: A grizzled police detective works in a town where the dangers of a new age run rampant, due in part to an influx of outsiders. He loses his partner in a shootout, but gains a new one, a member of that new population, and the two of them form an uneasy alliance against the crimes of the future.

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'I Am A Cat': All Humans Are Gray In The Dark

A scaled-down adaptation of Sōseki Natsume's dark comedy of human nature as seen through the eyes of a cat, but with all its cutting humor intact

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Out of all Sōseki Natsume's major works, I Am A Cat has always struck me as being the cruelest and most cynical, doubly so for being in the guise of a comedy. It's ostensibly about human foibles as seen through the eyes of an outsider -- in this case, the cat of the title -- but its real subject is the irredeemability of human nature. It starts lightheartedly enough as a comedy of manners and errors, and then by degrees turns darker until it reaches a conclusion of such breathtaking nihilism you wonder if it was the last thing Sōseki ever wrote.

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