A group of assassins come together for a suicide mission to kill an evil lord in Miike Takashi's latest offering. Having cut his teeth on action movies, he returns to the Samurai mission genre with gusto and the climax is an irresistable blend of exquisite choreography and bloodlust. The plot takes a backseat, but the interesting guy driving, Action-San, is who you want to watch anyway. find out more...

'Azumi' is a frantic CGI-assisted Japanese period drama from cult director Ryuhei Kitamura starring pop siren Aya Ueto as a teenage assassin who begins the film as the only girl among 10 warriors who have been trained from childhood by Jiji, a grey-bearded samurai. One day, Jiji tells them they must pass a final test before they embark on the mission they have prepared for all these years. He pairs them up and the five that survive, led by Jiji, descend from the mountain that is the only world t find out more...

What action there is in this downplayed drama stems from the homoerotic tensions generated by the enrolment of a beautiful young samurai into the Shinsengumi Militia, a school famous for its strict discipline code, and the period setting of late 19th Century Japan is effectively used to evoke the extreme secrecy that any kind of institutional homosexuality was forced to exist in. The swordplay provides a welcome interval between the desperate (and often sad) sex scenes, showing the samurai tende find out more...

Benkei, a master fighter and killer, vows never to take another life after his conversion to a syncretic form of Buddhism, but he lives in the time of the Genji-Heike clan wars and it becomes his fate to clash with a trio of fighters known only as "the demons". Taking up his sword once more, he sets out to end their murderous terror. This mix of sword and sorcery and samurai traditions is visibly resplendent and musically resonant, and lots of swords clash and blood squirts, not bad really. find out more...

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The heroes are back; Chapter One 'Four Months Later...'; Claire, HRG and family try to lie low in their new town, Matt and Mohinder are now guardians of Molly, Kaito and Angela receive death notices, Nathan is in a very dark place, Peter is alive and in Ireland. find out more...

The movie that confirmed Kurosawa's greatest strength, his innovative handling of genre. It's set amid the civil wars of 16th Century Japan, and concerns samurai Mifune escorting a princess and two oafish peasants through enemy territory. Kurosawa's treatment is part traditional (the plotting, the concept, the use of Noh theatre music), part eclectic (there are reminiscences of John Ford Westerns), and part truly idiosyncratic (the Shakespearean contracts between clowns and heroes). find out more...

A beautifuly staged historical epic set in a sixteenth century Japanese civil war. find out more...

A weird story, based on legend, about a mother and her daughter-in-law who survived in times of hardship by murdering Samurai and selling their armour to buy rice. A wonderfully strange and visually striking Japanese folk tale, unusual in itself, but also a beautiful and detailed character study. find out more...

A group of idealistic young men, determined to clean up the corruption in their town, are aided by a scruffy, cynical samurai, Sanjuro, who does not at all fit their concept of a noble warrior, but, of course, runs rings round the baddies. Kurosawa's sequel to his Japanese "Western" (Yojimbo), a fast-paced classic of Japanese cinema with a frenetic finale find out more...