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 ...

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 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 ...

I admit it. What I don’t know about samurai or martial arts flicks would fill up a thousand Thomas Video stores. I snobbishly dismissed the genre as cartoonish, over-the-top drivel geared toward ...

Blind Meng, played by Mo Tse, is a blind bounty hunter with a mysterious past who hunts wanted criminals during the twilight years of the Tang Dynasty, where corruption and lawlessness spread across ...

While it’s possible to call a good many historical movies from Japan “samurai films,” such movies can vary when it comes to the other genres they belong to. Certain samurai movies emphasize ...

Embed <iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/3807446/3807447" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"> A ...

Without a doubt, some samurai-related movies offer a good deal of entertainment value and adventure. Action scenes are always right around the corner when samurai swords are involved, after all, and ...