Average Rating: 8.2/10
Reviews Counted: 68
Fresh: 67 | Rotten: 1
Samurai epic as a touching drama.
Average Rating: 7.9/10
Critic Reviews: 22
Fresh: 22 | Rotten: 0
Samurai epic as a touching drama.
liked it
Average Rating: 4.2/5
User Ratings: 9,236
Veteran filmmaker Yoji Yamada -- who is perhaps most famous for cranking out most of the 48 films of the Tora-san series -- directs this good-natured drama set in the waning years of the Edo period (1600-1867). Seibei (Hiroyuki Sanada) is a low-level samurai struggling to get by on stipend of 50 rice bales a year while working as a clerk at the clan office. While his co-workers spend their evenings sucking down sake at the local pub, Seibei, whose wife has passed away, heads straight home to
Unrated, 2 hr. 9 min.
Apr 23, 2004 Wide
Dec 28, 2004
Empire Pictures
All Critics (76) | Top Critics (23) | Fresh (70) | Rotten (1) | DVD (12)
Beautifully captures the end of an age.
As Iguchi, Mr. Sanada epitomizes the kind of man who can still dream and be true to himself amid the daily grind and turmoil. That's a welcome role model in any age.
About the last days of an era, whittled to a poetic vision of a worthy, solitary man.
This is an old man's movie in all the good ways: gentle, humanistic, rich with observation, quietly aware of all that can't be solved by the sword.
Viewers who stick around will be rewarded with a complex, moving domestic drama -- and a couple of duels.
This is an absolutely brilliant film but in a quiet way.
There is violence -- the gritty, bloody kind, not the balletic jumping off walls variety -- but it is kept firmly in its place and never allowed to take over.
A story of a father who finds fulfillment in being a father.
Yamada has a master's touch, creating a foggy rural world of hills, rivers, and trees in springtime
gives us a humble family man protagonist who goes against the grain of the stereotypical Samurai archetype
A masterpiece about a reluctant warrior
Deeply humane... a bittersweet, eloquent tribute to a man who is bent but not crushed beneath the weight of his various competing duties.
Twilight Samurai is to Japanese samurai flicks what Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven was to American Westerns.
The film does have some very memorable moments. And Sanada's convincing performance as the world-weary former man of action certainly helps.
Director Yoji Yamada tenderly portrays Iguchi as an anomaly among the ambitious samurai - a quiet man who would rather farm than fight.
Touching, low-key melodrama on the personal side of a japanese warrior / salaryman. Bonus points for cool alternate language titles: Le Samouraï du Crépuscule and Samurai in der Dämmerung.
June 15, 2007Super Reviewer
Awesome Japanese 'Jane Austen' samurai drama flick. The direction of the film is beautifully impressionist. Yôji Yamada crafts pictures of everyday life which gives us an inherent understanding of the life of Seibei Iguchi (Hiroyuki Sanada), a low-ranking widowed samurai with a senile mother and two daughters, working
October 5, 2011
Super Reviewer
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