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, ...

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 ...

Most of you probably haven't heard of Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman (yet), but if you know anything about Japanese cinema you'd recognize him as an iconic character from Japan's longest-running and ...

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." ...

Jeremy has more than 2100 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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...