Kamui

There hasn’t been a decent ninja film for decades, but this one tops the genre. Sai treats his adaptation of a story from Shirato Sanpei’s legendary, multi-volume manga as a folk tale, complete with the grizzled, implacable voice of Yamazaki Tsutomu as narrator. Kamui (hot new star Matsuyama Kenichi, also seen in Yokohama Satoko’s Bare Essence of Life) has escaped rural poverty and family ties by becoming a ninja, but now wants a kind of freedom not available in feudal Japan, the freedom to live his own life. The plot finds him in an area controlled by the corrupt and effete Lord Gunbei, allying himself with the fisherman Hanbei and then all but press-ganged into joining a band of shark hunters. Secret identities, treachery and triple-bluffs on all sides, usually with Kamui as a target.