Takeshi Kitano confused much of his American audience with his recent Kikujiro. Best known here for violent, emotionally rich crime dramas such as Boiling Point, Sonatine, and Fireworks, many weren't prepared for a whimsical road movie exploring the relationship between a middle-aged curmudgeon (Kitano) and a melancholy orphan. As two new-to-video Kitano efforts make clear, however, Kikujiro simply comes from a different strand of his work. Made after Boiling Point, 1991's A Scene At The Sea (Kitano's first film from his own script) stars Kuroudo Maki as a deaf garbageman who, after repairing a discarded surfboard, becomes fascinated by the sport of surfing. At the encouragement of his girlfriend, he begins to spend much of his time pursuing his new hobby, in the process improving enough to enter local contests and win the respect of a group of local surfers. Though far different from his better-known films, Scene may be Kitano's most thorough exploration of his most persistent concern, the relationship between work and play and the manner in which both shape a person's identity. Kindhearted, funny, deliberately paced (at times excessively), and deceptively slight, it's a moving example of Kitano's unique sensibility—which doesn't always need to punctuate its expression with bursts of gunfire—and persistent attempt to get at what really matters in life. If the dialogue-light Scene represents a quiet extreme for Kitano and his bloody debut Violent Cop its opposite, 1996's Kids Return functions as a retreat from all extremes. By far Kitano's most conventional film to be released here, its plot could have been lifted from a Warner Bros.-produced hard-luck tale made in the '30s. Told in flashback after two old friends (Masanobu Ando and Ken Kaneko) meet by accident, Kids Return traces their relationship from inseparable, prank-loving juvenile miscreants to estrangement and back again. One becomes a promising boxer and the other a low-level Yakuza thug, but both find that their chosen professions put a strain on their friendship—making neither, Kitano strongly implies, worth the trouble. Poignant but too distant to be entirely involving, Kids Return is nevertheless a fine entry in Kitano's filmography. Featuring tough guys in search of tenderness in a world that offers it in short supply, it's also quintessential Kitano. His importance only grows more apparent with each film that surfaces here.