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 ...

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." ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Zatoichi is a beautiful film, in muted colours, and, perhaps to suit the hero's aural hypersensitivity, it's almost a musical. There's a magical moment where Zatoichi walks along a road past a field ...