Kikujiro

Kikujiro (1999) is Takeshi Kitano's summer road movie, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Nine-year-old Masao is stranded for the holidays — no father around, a mother who left for the seaside long ago, a grandmother gone all day at work. So the boy sets out to find his mom himself.

His travel companion turns out to be Kikujiro, an aging deadbeat and former yakuza who swears, loses their money on bicycle races, and settles arguments with his fists. Kitano plays him with a stone face and the rarest of grins. He takes the job grudgingly and, early on, blows more cash than he raises. But the trip toward the coast stretches into a string of odd, funny, awkward encounters: bikers, a wandering poet, campers on vacation. Somewhere along that road the brute starts genuinely caring about the silent kid beside him.

Kitano named the character after his own father. The tender, almost fairy-tale score comes from Joe Hisaishi — Hayao Miyazaki's longtime composer — and its main theme became iconic in its own right. The film screened in competition at Cannes. It is a rare thing: a director known for brutal crime dramas making something close to a children's film, and it aches more than any of his shootouts. Stream Kikujiro (1999) online on iFILM.