The Twilight Samurai

A gorgeous, emotionally rewarding masterpiece that invites compassion, reflection and, at least from this reviewer, a great deal of admiration. It's no wonder that it won 12 Japanese Academy Awards.

Combines novelistic detail with cinematic sweep.

This is a determined, resolutely paced, and atypical samurai movie, more an epic of the heart than of the battlefield, and all the more powerful for it.

Welcome to Yoji Yamada. After decades of comedies, he arrives--in this country, at least--with a uniquely touching samurai film. At the age of seventy-three, he starts a new career.

Timeless.

Though it includes a couple of sword fights, Yamada's epic domestic drama could easily be called an anti-samurai film. But its aim is less to subvert the genre's conventions than to deepen them, extending its parameters to include the minutia and rhythms of everyday life.

Gentle, muted film of limited aesthetic ambition.

Life could be simple yet bring us happiness. Colours are not the best to keep you going as day go by. The Twilight Samurai, takes us into mid 19th century's Japan and makes us fall in live with the civilization. Like the era it represents, the direction is very clean yet effective. Although movie is shot in 2002 but it actually takes us to centuries ago into the era Yoji Yamada is telling story of. Power of a creator. Everything is in aspect and very real. From emotions to the sword fight, there is nothing fantasized or emotionalized. A perfect movie for a Sunday afternoon.

Yes, it does play into melodramatic elements that may obfuscate those who expect something different but the idea is to appreciate other elements of a samurai warrior, not what always involves that's blood and honor.