Audio: Japanese
Subtitles: English/Korean

Battle Royale is one of the year's most amazing movies and a vicious take-off on reality TV that turns a high-school milieu dominated by cliques and childish relationships into a war zone. Now, I have no actual way of knowing whether venerable Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku had Survivor or programs like it in mind when making the film, or whether those programs influenced the novel by Koshun Takami upon which it is based. But the film is permeated by a sadism that's redolent of the voyeuristic pleasure American audiences have taken in Survivor and programs like it, entertainment that involves the humiliation of at least one participant per week on national television. A Japnanese film that elucidates hard times in what seems to be an alternate-universe Japan ("the nation collapsed and 15 percent unemployment and 800,000 students boycotted school"), and pits adults versus teenagers by explaining that the government passed something called the Millennium Educational Reform Act, which apparently provides for one class of ninth-graders to be chosen each year and set at each other's throats in a "Battle Royale" set in a remote locale. Each student is given a weapon, and all are warned that only one shall survive.

- Directed by Kinji Fukasaku
- Written by Kenta Fukasaku
- From the novel by Koshun Takami
- Edited by Hirohidi Abe
- Starring: Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Taro Yamamoto, and Takeshi Kitano