The Hidden Blade: Critic Reviews

The Hidden Blade is tranquil, touching, and, in its climactic sword fight, excitingly real.

An affecting portrait of the impact of profound change on people with limited options.

Yamada's enormously enjoyable The Hidden Blade is a movie that deftly balances the obligations of samurai history with love story.

From the beginning Yamada's movie, made in 2004, looks and feels more like a John Ford western than any other Asian film I've ever seen.

Both epic and intimate, this impassioned samurai drama is for anyone who's ever watched a movie and muttered, 'They just don't make 'em like they used to.'

The Hidden Blade bears more than a passing resemblance in story and form to The Twilight Samurai, but stands on its own as a pleasant, if unremarkable, romance.

Second installment in Yamada's samurai trilogy. Once again the hero is unlike the super-warriors of the genre, but far more interesting.

A character-driven, martial arts adventure more concerned with motivations than karate moves.

Hidden Blade works, then, as that rare, intellectually stirring historical pageant, but also as a deeply emotional, satisfying samurai movie, one of the crown jewels of the genre.

a totally immersive experience

A tenacious survival tale in which passionate lovers are held apart by outmoded traditions. How they overcome obstacles to happiness is what makes the film so dramatically engaging.

It's a pretty simple tale, but -- true to his Western influences -- Yamada slows down the action and stretches it out to a prize-winning length.

... the restrained drama both punctures the mythic ideal of the samurai culture and spins a romantic portrait of one man who values principle over protocol...

This is a film buff's movie but also has strong appeal to those who just want to be told a darn good story.

Reminders of feudal Japan are mixed in with a prescient glimpse into the country's future. The samurai will not be part of it, and The Hidden Blade poignantly shows what is lost in the name of progress.

Yamada's film is old-fashioned in the very best sense. He is a great story teller and director of actors.

Good, but a bit of a snorer.

Casually paced and filled with telling detail, Yamada's delicate drama with swordplay (there's not much, but what there is packs an emotional wallop) transcends its specific setting in its depiction of Katagiri's internal struggle.

[R]eminded me of one of [John] Ford's more elegiac Westerns

While Yamada essentially repeats himself structurally, he finds fresh ironies in the story of how a culture built on tradition gets corrupted by technology and years of inaction.

Yamada's film is strong and poignant, though perhaps it will be more so with Japanese audiences who better understand societal pressure.