This article comes from Den of Geek UK. In the 1978 US documentary The Blind Swordsman, Shintaro Katsu is asked how he’d like to present himself to American viewers. “I have zero interest in promoting ...

Jeremy has more than 2200 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 ...

The colossally popular Zatoichi films make up the longest-running action series in Japanese history and created one of the screen’s great heroes: an itinerant blind masseur who also happens to be a ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...

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, ...

Takeshi Kitano’s reincarnation of the Zatoichi character presents him much the same as the original: humble, champion of the powerless, and able to slice and dice better than those who can see.