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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

One of the most popular heroes in Japanese cinema, Zatoichi the blind swordsman inspired 26 feature films, more than 100 TV episodes, and countless comics and collectibles. But for a matinee idol, he ...

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." ...

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 ...

Every so often, just as the samurai film seems to be limping to its demise in Japan, a director comes along to give it a new shot of life. Five years ago, Nagisa Oshima gave the genre a homoerotic ...

Zatoichi is reluctant to get involved, because he knows how often such involvement has led to trouble in the past. But events conspire to thrust him repeatedly into involvement, and gradually he comes ...

Beginning with the Uncharted series, and later perfected in The Last of Us, Sony Interactive Entertainment has made playable cinematic experiences its bread and butter over the last two decades.

Between 1962 and 1988, 26 highly successful samurai films were made in Japan about Zatoichi. They starred the chubby, unprepossessing Katsu Shintaro as the "blind swordsman", a sweaty, grunting, ...