HARA-KIRI: DEATH OF A SAMURAI (NR) A destitute samurai, Tsugumo (Ebizô Ichikawa), arrives on the doorstop of a powerful warrior clan, requesting to commit hara-kiri. The lord (Kôji Yakusho) of the castle is suspicious. It's a time of peace in 17th-century Japan, and many out of work samurai are looking for a handout. He tells Tsugumo of one such samurai (Eita) who tried to extort money. Tsugumo assures the lord that he is not disgracing them or the code. Before committing suicide, however, he proceeds to tell a tale of misery and great tragedy. Then he exacts his vengeance.

When the prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike burst on the international cinema scene in the late 1990s, his balls-out approach to storytelling in movies like Fudoh: The Next Generation, Dead or Alive and the notoriously sadistic Ichi the Killer, simultaneously found devoted fans and detractors. Miike was a gleefully unapologetic cult director and that was part of his bloody charm. There was a real anarchic energy to his work. However, to be truthful, it wasn't actually any good. Great for a laugh while downing a few beers, but it was anything but important cinema. His 1999 horror movie Audition was a different beast entirely. Although still charged with Miike's love of the perverse, the movie revealed a brilliant tactician at work. Audition is one of the finest, most disturbing horror movies of the last 25 years, and it showed that Miike was a more intelligent filmmaker than many initially believed.

A couple of years ago, after making close to 80 features, Miike delivered his best yet, the samurai movie 13 Assassins. He returns to the jidaigeki genre with Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (VOD). It's a remake of Masaki Kobayashi's masterpiece Harakiri, starring the magnificent Tatsuya Nakadai. Kobayashi's movie was a scathing attack on the hypocrisy of the samurai code and a subversive critique of the genre. Miike's take is impressively stately, sophisticated and faithful. That is, until the last act, when the puckishly deviant director can't hold back any longer and unleashes his own unique attack on the philosophy of martial might. Hara-Kiri is filled with quiet, emotionally resonant moments (a father and daughter share a rice cake; Tsugumo futilely tries to patch up the shredded paper-thin walls from a brutal winter cold; severed top knots tossed onto frozen pebbles), but when Tsugumo reveals his plan, it's shattering and rousingly dramatic.