Join uptight David Starsky and laid-back Ken “Hutch” Hutchinson as they’re paired for the first time as undercover cops. The new partners must overcome their differences to solve an important case with help from street informant Huggy Bear and persuasive criminal Reese Feldman.

Top Coppers follows the adventures of cops John Mahogany and Mitch Rust, as they attempt to rid the fictional world of Justice City from its deranged criminal underworld. The universe and its characters are derived from the conventions of American and British cop shows of the Seventies and Eighties, from Starsky & Hutch to The Professionals, but is set in no specific time or country. With big, silly characters and hilarious stories, Top Coppers is filled with familiar tropes and references from the police and action genres, as well as drawing on relatable British situations, problems and relationships.

Taking his inspiration from the biggest scandal in Japan’s police history, Kazuya Shiraishi has created a massive and sinister crime epic about the grand forces of corruption that brings to mind the best of Kinji Fukasaku’s yakuza movies (​Cops vs. Thugs among others). Starting in 1970s Hokkaido like a nervous Japanese Starsky & Hutch–​chan, the film charts the moral descent of Detective Moroboshi (Go Ayano) over three decades. Green in years but already hard‐grained and ready to play rough, the young cop quickly gets a bit too cozy with the other side of the law when his senior colleague Murai (Pierre Taki) teaches him the ropes and ruts of the police business. Soon, he swaggers and rants through the streets of Sapporo a lean, mean, sex‐crazy bully, indistinguishable from a yakuza. Burning with the same blaze as the hard‐boiled classics of yore, ​Twisted Justice scorches away the sleekness and macho self‐congratulation of the genre. ​