Unlock access to every one of the hundreds of articles published daily on BroadwayWorld by logging in with one click. Japan Society's latest Monthly Classics film series The Double-Edged Sword: The ...

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 ...

Old timers like me want to revisit old loves and past guilty pleasures. It so happened that during the long lockdown, as I was rummaging through my old DVDs, I was able to dig out my collection of ...

Shintarô Katsu stars as a well-endowed lawman in 19th-century Japan who uses his sexual prowess and razor-sharp sword to uncover corruption in the first entry of a kinky samurai trilogy. Directed by ...

Shintarō Katsu (勝 新太郎 Katsu Shintarō?), born Toshio Okumura (奥村 利夫 Okumura Toshio, November 29, 1931—June 21, 1997; nicknamed Katsu-shin) was a Japanese actor, singer, producer, and director. He was ...

For the first time on film, Takeshi Kitano looks harmless. He’s sitting on a rock in a rural Japanese nowhere, eyes shut. A band of thieves enters the frame and sees what the audience sees: an old ...

It's always fun to write about ZATOICHI, and the upcoming DVD release of the latest version of the franchise, ICHI, gives me a good excuse. Every country has a favourite rebel hero in pop culture, a ...

Like their American counterparts, Japanese movie lovers have long embraced recurring characters and storylines. But their film franchises reached a peak in the 1960s and '70s. At that time, series in ...