Kitao Sakurai
Kitao Sakurai turns up in these credits as an actor long before he was a director: a role in Best of the Best 3: No Turning Back in 1995, then one of the Stygian Triplets in Dogma in 1999. Japanese born and American based, he moved behind the camera and found a form almost nobody else was working in.
His long collaboration is with Eric Andre. As principal director of The Eric Andre Show from 2012 to 2023, Sakurai's job was to make chaos legible: hidden cameras, bystanders who have agreed to nothing, guests who do not know what is coming, and a set built to be wrecked on schedule. It looks improvised and is heavily engineered, and that gap is the skill.
Bad Trip, in 2021, stretched the method to feature length, a hidden-camera comedy with an actual plot, written and directed by Sakurai, who also appears in it. Next comes the largest possible test of whether the sensibility scales: he is directing the film adaptation of Street Fighter.
Movies (6)
Where to start with Kitao Sakurai
Bad Trip is the place to start, since it states most clearly what Sakurai does. The pranks are real, the bystanders are real, and a scripted road-movie story keeps running through them, which is far harder to hold together than either half would be alone.
From there, The Eric Andre Show is the body of work, though it sits outside the credits gathered here. What remains on this page is curiosity value: Dogma, where a very young Sakurai is one of the Stygian Triplets, and Best of the Best 3: No Turning Back, a mid-nineties martial-arts sequel. Street Fighter is the one to watch for, an adaptation of the fighting game and the first time this sensibility gets a studio budget behind it.