Zatoichi

Beat Takeshi Kitano directs and plays the title role in this tribute to the wildly popular "blind swordsman" of Japanese cinema who was the hero of more than 20 movies and a television series from the early '60s to the late '80s. In Kitano's version, Zatôichi wanders into a town harassed by criminal ...more

Beat Takeshi Kitano's Zatôichi is an artfully crowd-pleasing riff on the samurai action film. Zatôichi , the beloved hero of a long-running series of genre flicks (which still play regularly on American television), is the perfect match for the impishly violent screen persona Kitano has developed over the course of his film career in films like Fireworks and Brother. With his eyes closed and sporting a knowing smile, he dispatches baddie after baddie in a spray of digitized blood. Kitano the ...more