Disturbing yet enthralling

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Here we have the earliest samurai flick on record -- although whether it was filmed by a cameraman in Japan or taken of a traveling troupe of Japanese performers in Paris I have no idea. Europe had been fascinated by Japan and Japanese culture for some time, ever since Perry had opened the country to westerners in 1854; and Gilbert & Sullivan had produced THE MIKADO a dozen years before this.Although this seems a rough and chaotic mêlée, it is the very chaotic nature of the action that maintains its interest; the viewer's eye is drawn from one flashing weapon to the other and never has the chance to grow bored. Compare this with the mannered, almost sedate way such combats are choreographed in the works of, say, Kurosawa.