Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

This is the second and the final film directed by Kazuhiko Hasegawa (excluding a super-obscure pinku film), whose mother was subjected to the Hiroshima radiation while she was pregnant with him. As chance would have it, The Man Who Stole the Sun is a film that deals with nuclear paranoia, its title mirroring the scary idea that practically anyone could make an atomic bomb if determined enough. Some of the footage from the film was cut at government request because the bomb-making instructions were too detailed. The film was co-written by Leonard Schrader (brother of Taxi Driver writer Paul Schrader), who lived in Japan at the time.The two main characters are polar opposites in terms of their significance in pop-culture. The protagonist is played by Kenji Sawada (aka Julie Sawada), a pop-star and a plain symbol of the new generation, while his rival is played by Bunta Sugiwara, who became famous playing hard-boiled gangsters (one character in this film remarks; "He looks more like a gangster than a cop to me"). Their cat and mouse game makes way for an unpredictable plot, partially set during the actual Communist Party May Day march, where the scenes were mostly shot without permission, and assistant director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (later a famous director of his own) got arrested for throwing fake money off of a building and almost inciting a riot.Despite its preposterous length, the movie keeps your attention throughout with the help of many tonal shifts. Without pardon it goes from a hostage crisis thriller to a cutesy school drama, action comedy, nuclear thriller, quirky romance with a radio host, experimental lunacy, car chase and finally an epic standoff as a part of an outrageously ballsy and over- the-top finale which makes everything worthwhile in the end. Amazingly strange. I also dig the 70s feel to it, from the soundtrack to the color scheme where everything is seen through pink lens.

The man who stole the sun starts well. Almost like a Japanese 'Taxi Driver' with a high school teacher making an atom bomb in his house. Why does he do it? No idea. Its never explained. The film suffers from personality crisis and shifts constantly. Is the hero a nice guy? Seems to be, everything we know about him says yes. oh wait...hes just killed a pool full of kids. He also seems to hero-worship a police detective (who is the best character in the film) but ends up killing him in a grotesque way, again for no discernible reason. But most seriously, this film is long. Way too long. It stand at 2 hours and 30 minutes...Id take 45 minutes out of it. lose some of the many shots of the hero wandering around doing nothing, or better still cut out the entire pointless love story with the irritating radio DJ. I guess the reason for being overly critical here is that it starts so well. I expected a lot more...

After being held hostage by a dissatisfied citizen, a high school teacher--who is a hopeless bum with no mission in life whatsoever--follows a similar path to express his dissatisfaction: by building an atomic bomb in his apartment. In the end he blows everything up.What we have here is a totally nihilistic filmgoing experience. The message seems to be that society has fostered dissatisfied citizens who sense no purpose in life. In fact their only sense of achievement can be felt through destruction. Some fingers are pointed to Mr. Big Brother aka the conservative government, which has oppressed the wants of some people, for example by keeping the Rolling Stones out of the country because the band symbolized drugs.I think (I hope) anyone can see that the main character here is a nut, albeit a highly dangerous one since he could blow up Tokyo with a little ball. The point is that once the sense of purpose in life is lost, all hell breaks loose.

Very well make... there are car chasing, gun shooting and even more... after watching this movie you may know how to make an atomic bomb!! Try to pick up this film in Video or Vcd.