I will concede to a fair trade with Pusan, having seen Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django here at TIFF and the crowd at Pusan getting to see his other, other latest picture to hit the festival circuit, Crows Zero. His two other films to hit the circuit are of course Django and Like a Dragon. And now that Crows Zero has screened at Pusan the reviews are rolling in and they are in large part fairly positive about the flick. You're going to have to act quickly because some of these links are going to disappear soon.

Hollywood Reporter - Protean and prolific director Takashi Miike's latest youth actioner can be described as "Volcano High" with brains. Unlike "Volcano," a Korean teen cult action film which delivers punch after punch of repetitive mind-numbing violence, "Crows Episode 0" (Kurouzu Episoudo Zero) lucidly dissects the infrastructure of gangland in a high school, showing how it's a miniature of the yakuza pecking order. For those who prefer mind-numbing violence, there is enough protracted fist fights to give them concussions.

Screen Daily - Crows is, naturally, another cult item for midnight crowds around the world, but most particularly Asia. Miike's wildly violent opera will not disappoint them. He has his formulae, usually picked up from the manga culture of the Japanese youth, and he belabours them to death in his films. Whether with fists, guns or swords, the name of the game is intensity. Hit before you talk.

Variety Asian - Pic finds Miike still on his current creative roll, if not at the same inspired level as yakuza fightfest "Dragon." There's the same mixture of irony and deadly seriousness in the face-offs and mano a mano fighting, as well as a central hero who simply gets off on the physical pain of combat. But the grungy high-school setting places the pic in a much more restricted universe than "Dragon," and the virtually all-male story has little of "Dragon's" melancholy romanticism.