A man standing in front of me suddenly claps his hand and the sake bottle flies away. At that moment, show a sword-drawing technique that doesn't catch your eye ... The moment you put the sword in the ...

For years, the Japanese cinema cranked out samurai adventures about a blind swordsman named Zatoichi. As a job description, “blind swordsman” does not sound reassuring, but it’s a gimmick that has ...

Nobody can make you like this stuff if you don't want to. So although there's no doubt that "The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi" is the summer's most rousing action picture, it's also hard as nails, bloody ...

STONE-FACED Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano blurs the line between insanity and genius with “The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi,” his sublimely syncopated reimagining of the popular samurai movie series ...

It's not that "The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi" lacks gory scenes. When a sightless masseur chops off a gambler's hand, the amputated limb spouts a geyser of blood on par with anything in "Kill Bill." ...

Zatoichi is reluctant to get involved, because he knows how often such involvement has led to trouble in the past. But events conspire to thrust him repeatedly into involvement, and gradually he comes ...

A do-gooder blind masseur with a penchant for gambling and steel blades might appear an unlikely cinematic hero. But after he first appeared in the 1962 Japanese film "Zatoichi Monogatari" ("The Tale ...

What separates “Zatoichi” from other swordfight movies is that the eponymous hero, played, of course, by Kitano himself, is blind. Like the many other directors of films featuring this well-known ...

“The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi,” the latest entertainment from Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano, isn’t your average blind masseur-gambler-swordsman movie. Based on a series of popular genre standards ...