Fielding questions about Kubi, a period piece chronicling a few years of internecine feudal wars in 16th-century Japan, Takeshi Kitano dismissed some rumors he’d stoked. The film wasn’t going to be his last, as he’d previously suggested. In fact, he was already working on the next, a parody that would explore “the theme of comedy within violent movies.” I have no way of knowing when exactly the director will choose to put an end to a career that’s spanned four decades––the man is so prolific and allergic to stasis you’d expect him to keep working till the very last breath. But there’s something about his latest, Broken Rage, that makes it an apt summation of his cinema, and a farewell-of-sorts; hidden behind its farcical facades is the specter of a filmmaker revisiting his entire canon, leitmotifs, and style.

In the months between Kubi...