Kids Return

9/8/2026

**Summary: 7/10: an unforced, wryly funny meditation on failure, and Kitano's most tender work, arguing that a life spent circling is not the same thing as a life wasted.** Two boys ride one bicycle in slow circles around an empty schoolyard. The film opens on that image and returns to it at the end, and everything between is an argument about whether failure is a destination, or merely weather. Takeshi Kitano made this film after nearly, accidentally killing himself. In August 1994 he put a scooter into a barrier in Tokyo and spent months recovering. *Kids Return* was the first thing he directed once he could work. Knowing that, the title stops being a title and becomes a question the director is asking himself with a camera: what does it mean to begin again from a position of fai