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 ...

Jeremy has more than 2100 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly ...

The hundred episodes of the TV series followed 1970s TV dynamics: Zatoichi was (mostly) unchanging from one episode to the next, and the 45-minute episodes (allowing for 15 minutes of advertisement ...

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 ...

MADRID — Takeshi Kitano’s “Zatoichi” took the top prize at the 36th Sitges Catalonia Intl. Film Festival, which wound down Saturday with a well-received screening of “11.14,” toplining Hilary Swank ...

For all their considerable charms, the Zatoichi films are the epitome of genre filmmaking at its most formulaic. By contrast, since branching out from TV, director-editor-writer-actor Takeshi Kitano ...

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 ...

Most of you probably haven't heard of Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman (yet), but if you know anything about Japanese cinema you'd recognize him as an iconic character from Japan's longest-running and ...

“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 ...