A group of assassins come together for a suicide mission to kill an evil lord in Miike Takashi's latest offering. Having cut his teeth on action movies, he returns to the Samurai mission genre with gusto and the climax is an irresistable blend of exquisite choreography and bloodlust. The plot takes a backseat, but the interesting guy driving, Action-San, is who you want to watch anyway. find out more...

'Azumi' is a frantic CGI-assisted Japanese period drama from cult director Ryuhei Kitamura starring pop siren Aya Ueto as a teenage assassin who begins the film as the only girl among 10 warriors who have been trained from childhood by Jiji, a grey-bearded samurai. One day, Jiji tells them they must pass a final test before they embark on the mission they have prepared for all these years. He pairs them up and the five that survive, led by Jiji, descend from the mountain that is the only world t find out more...

What action there is in this downplayed drama stems from the homoerotic tensions generated by the enrolment of a beautiful young samurai into the Shinsengumi Militia, a school famous for its strict discipline code, and the period setting of late 19th Century Japan is effectively used to evoke the extreme secrecy that any kind of institutional homosexuality was forced to exist in. The swordplay provides a welcome interval between the desperate (and often sad) sex scenes, showing the samurai tende find out more...

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The movie that confirmed Kurosawa's greatest strength, his innovative handling of genre. It's set amid the civil wars of 16th Century Japan, and concerns samurai Mifune escorting a princess and two oafish peasants through enemy territory. Kurosawa's treatment is part traditional (the plotting, the concept, the use of Noh theatre music), part eclectic (there are reminiscences of John Ford Westerns), and part truly idiosyncratic (the Shakespearean contracts between clowns and heroes). find out more...

A beautifuly staged historical epic set in a sixteenth century Japanese civil war. find out more...

A weird story, based on legend, about a mother and her daughter-in-law who survived in times of hardship by murdering Samurai and selling their armour to buy rice. A wonderfully strange and visually striking Japanese folk tale, unusual in itself, but also a beautiful and detailed character study. find out more...

A group of idealistic young men, determined to clean up the corruption in their town, are aided by a scruffy, cynical samurai, Sanjuro, who does not at all fit their concept of a noble warrior, but, of course, runs rings round the baddies. Kurosawa's sequel to his Japanese "Western" (Yojimbo), a fast-paced classic of Japanese cinema with a frenetic finale find out more...

Set in remote north-west China at the birth of the Qing Dynasty in the late seventeenth century. A new law has banned martial arts on pain of death, and an army of bounty hunters, led by balding psycho Fire-Wind, targets Martial Village, where rebel lovers Wu and Han have won the friendship of a retired executioner who convinces to seek help from a master swordsmen from distant Mount Heaven. He agrees, sending four of his disciples to assist them, but as they lead the village to a safer place, t find out more...

From the director of Oscar-nominated The Twilight Samurai. Set in then mid-19th century, at the time when guns are taking over from swords, Yoji Yamada's tale is an exploration of Samurai ethics and forbidden love. find out more...