A group of young men set out to clean up the corruption in their town. They are joined by a scruffy, cynical samurai who doesn't fit their concept of how a warrior should look and act.

Peace in 17th-century Japan causes the Shogunate's breakup of warrior clans, throwing thousands of samurai out of work and into poverty. An honorable end to such fate under the samurai code is ritual suicide, or hara-kiri. After an unemployed samurai is forced to commit harakiri before a feudal lord, his father-in-law returns to the scene, seemingly to play out the same agonizing suicide ritual.

This epic masterpiece is about a group of 16th century samurai who are hired to defend a small Japanese village that finds itself annually raided by an army of bandits who steal the meager crops harvested by the peasants. Tired of relinquishing their food supply but woefully inept in combat skills, the villagers decide to hire a band of samurai to protect them. In addition to the primary conflict between the villagers and the bandits, much of the...

Set in the Middle Ages, the nature of truth and subjective reality are probed in a series of flashbacks from four viewpoints to present the case history of a man's murder and the rape of his wife by a bandit.

Director Hirokazu Koreeda turns the popularly held conventions of the typical samurai revenge 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 samurai Sozaemon Aoki (Junichi Okada) has arrived in Edo to seek revenge against Jubei Kanazawa (Tadanobu Asano). Kanazawa is the man responsible for the death...

Nothing comes easy for rabbit ronin Usagi, not even being a spectator at the planned duel between his former teacher, Katsuichi, and Katsuichi's rival, Nakamura Koji. Before the duel even begins, Usagi becomes embroiled in a dispute between Koji and a local fencing school that demands the samurai challenge its master. Along the way, Usagi discovers a devastating secret-a weakness in Koji's style. It's a secret that could save Katsuichi's's life, but...

"The idea of the sword-wielding samurai, beholden to a strict ethical code and trained in deadly martial arts, dominates popular conceptions of the samurai. As early as the late seventeenth century, they were heavily featured in literature, art, theater, and even comedy, from the Tale of the Heike to the kabuki retellings of the 47 Ronin. This legacy remains with us today in the legendary Akira Kurosawa films, the shoguns of HBO's Westworld, and countless...

"What did it mean to be a ninja or a samurai? Did they really have special abilities? What was life like for them in ancient Japan? Find out the answers to these questions and more as Jack and Annie track the facts behind some of history's most intriguing and secretive figures"--Amazon.com.

A Samurai warrior-assassin is forced to hide in a small Western town in the American Badlands after refusing a mission.