But there’s still enough “Beat” in Kitano for him to retain his impish streak. In “The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi,” more so than any other Kitano film save for the little-known “Getting Any?,” a gag is ...

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 ...

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 ...

Japan's Takeshi "Beat" Kitano, now 57, has parlayed his rampant popularity in Japan into an eclectic film career that has resuscitated the once-moribund Japanese yakuza genre with a series of films – ...

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” begins life as a straight-up samurai movie, evolves into a slapstick comedy and ends as a rousing, tap-dancing musical. That may sound clunky, but writer-director ...

Depending on who you ask, the name Takeshi "Beat" Kitano will evoke different responses. There are those who grew up on Japanese television and know him for his slapstick humor, painted-on mustaches, ...

An updating of the character that dominated Japanese films andtelevision from 1962 to 1989, “The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi”brings with it powerful new tools for special-effects action andhumor, along ...

“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 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 ...

For the first time on film, Takeshi Kitano looks harmless. He’s sitting on a rock in a rural Japanese nowhere, eyes shut. A band of thieves enters the frame and sees what the audience sees: an old ...