Genre "Samurai Film" Movies
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| 1. Azumi (year: 2003) |
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Orphaned as a little girl, Azumi (Aya Ueto) is raised in the forest with a group of ten children by their master (Yoshio Harada), who trains them to be peerless assassins. Azumi and Nachi (Shun Oguri) are the strongest of the fighters. When the group comes of age, the master gives them one final tes ...
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| 2. Dororo (year: 2007) |
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A fierce woman warrior joins a wandering demon hunter on his quest to recover the missing body parts and regain his natural form in director Akihiko Shiota's adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's popular manga of the same name. Years ago, malevolent ruler Daigo Kagemitsu promised to deliver his unborn son to ...
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| 3. Hana (year: 2006) |
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Director Hirokazu Koreeda turns the popularly held conventions of the typical samurai evenge tale on their head with this story of a man whose quest to avenge the death of his father gradually takes a back seat to his emerging role as a key figure in the community. The year is 1702, and young samura ...
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| 4. Izo (year: 2004) |
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The insanely prolific Takashi Miike teams again with screenwriter Shigenori Takechi (Graveyard of Honor) for his first samurai film, Izo. The film begins where Hideo Gosha's 1969 Hitokiri (the last film author Yukio Mishima starred in before his suicide) left off, with the crucifixion and bloody exe ...
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| 5. Kagemusha (year: 1980) |
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Just as many American studio-era directors found acclaim abroad that was denied them in their home country, by 1980 Akira Kurosawa's reputation outside Japan exceeded his esteem at home. As uncompromising as ever, he found considerable difficulty securing backing for his ambitious projects. Unsure h ...
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| 6. Ran (year: 1985) |
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Ran is Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's reinterpretation of William Shakespeare's King Lear. The Lear counterpart is an elderly 16th-century warlord (Tatsuya Nakadai), who announces that he's about to divide his kingdom equally among his three sons. In his dotage, he falls prey to the false flatt ...
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| 7. Rashomon (year: 1951) |
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This landmark film is a brilliant exploration of truth and human weakness. It opens with a priest, a woodcutter, and a peasant taking refuge from a downpour beneath a ruined gate in 12th-century Japan. The priest and the woodcutter, each looking stricken, discuss the trial of a notorious bandit for ...
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| 8. Sex and Fury (year: 1973) |
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This was the first of two films in which Japanese exploitation star Reiko Ike played the character of Inoshika Ocho. After a brief prologue depicting the murder of Ocho's policeman father, it is revealed that she has grown up to become a professional gambler. Sex & Fury chronicles Ocho's exploit ...
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| 9. Shinobi (year: 2005) |
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Enraged by decades of treachery and mistrust, two magical samurai clans go to war despite the love that was meant to keep the peace in director Ten Shimoyama's feudal action entry. The year is 1614, and Japan has been unified under supreme shogun Tokugawa. Though the love shared between Gennosuke of ...
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| 10. Shogun Assassin (year: 1980) |
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More a "greatest hits" movie than an actual stand-alone film of its own, Shogun Assassin is the delirious hybrid of two episodes of the popular Baby Cart series dubbed into English and fused together into a hyper-violent bloodbath ballet that's sure to entertain the samurai-film enthusiast ...
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| 11. The Princess Blade (year: 2002) |
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Based on a manga series, this science fiction-adventure is set in a near future in which Japan is governed by a monarchy who use a highly trained band of samurai-style assassins known as the House of Takemikazuchi to suppress a fierce band of rebels. Yuki (Yumiko Shaku), a lethal young female member ...
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| 12. Zatoichi (year: 2003) |
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Beat Takeshi Kitano directs and plays the title role in this tribute to the wildly popular "blind swordsman" of Japanese cinema who was the hero of more than 20 movies and a television series from the early '60s to the late '80s. In Kitano's version, Zatôichi wanders into a town harassed b ...
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