Twilight Samurai

This is a really charming film about a poor samurai who must raise his two girls on his own. Meanwhile, Japan is slowly adapting a samurai-free government, and trouble lurks on the horizon in the form of body odor, beautiful women and swordfights. There’s a couple of violent scenes in Twilight Samurai, but it’s not a chop-socky action film. Rather, the violence seems to be important, and much hangs on it. In that way, TS is a throwback to earlier films, where character and motivation were informed by, and gave meaning to, action. Thus, I imagine Americans won’t like it much. But it’s pretty and touching and not at all maudlin or schlocky, so if you have 129 minutes available to you, you could do worse than to spend them on this old-fashioned story of redemption through violence.