Critic Reviews

A further, captivating extension of Oshima's marriage of the oblique and the erotic.

It takes a director with exceptional talent, skill and experience to explore ambiguity in all aspects of human nature and behavior, and Oshima has created a film of resilient, downright tensile strength that ends on a satisfyingly ironic note.

Above all, Oshima has fashioned a tale of men among men that feels familiar at first, then moves boldly into more enigmatic terrain.

An action film at once baroque and austere, hypnotic and opaque.

Illustrates the underlying fear that when energies that should be directed toward warfare are diverted into passion, unity is impossible.

Emblematic of the man's (Oshima) career: ironic, ambiguous, sublime.

Ripe with homoeroticism, but also with what the director — who made the film after recovering from a stroke a few years back — calls "the scent of murder."

It's hard to figure exactly what the point of this movie is -- except maybe to expose the myth of samurai machismo.

The movie's most striking assets are its lyrical visual style, which forms a silky counterpoint to the plot's turbulent emotions, and Beat Takeshi's smooth and expressive performance as a senior warrior.

Oshima, directing his first film in 14 years, has found an actor with the physical attributes to play the character and seems content to leave it at that; his camera regards Sozaburo as an object of beauty but hardly seems to engage him.