New Tale of Zatoichi

The first color entry in the series sees Zatoichi visiting the samurai who trained him to use a sword, while also being pursued by the brother of a yakuza boss he killed in the previous film. There's a weak subplot about a shady kidnapping, but Ichi's impossible desire to give up his sword and live an honest life is pretty compelling stuff. Great production values, excellent music and frequent (though bloodless) action. A quality swordplay drama.

Probably the most sad and heartfelt one. It really helps to show why he remained on the downward spiral, never taking a chance to get out.

More visually ambitious and impressive than the previous two, and the emotional arc of Zatoichi is effective enough.

It seems this series is incapable of including subtlety into its plot/characters. If this was the Lone Wolf or Hanzo flicks that'd be fine, but for drama to be seriously conveyed, there needs to be SOME kind of progression or complexity introduced in this already stale format.

The way it is shot and cinematography is amazing but the way Z is acting towards women is giving me the creeps and doesn't make sense.

Bad guys turn good, good guys turn bad, and all the topsy-turvy character inversions in the story point towards twin constants of love and duty - so of course Ichi is only allowed one. It gets incredibly weepy, distractingly so, but the shot design picks up the slack when the dialogue becomes tedious.

In which Ichi is a reflective, sorrowful character filled with regret. It's an interesting angle on the character, but the plotting in this installment is clumsy and largely flat-out boring.

Maratona Zatôichi filme #3. Por incrível que parece já estamos no terceiro filme da série e a qualidade é mantida, assim como seu espírito trágico, mas fatalmente isso não acontecerá nos 25 filmes da série. Box Versátil.

The first act begins to flesh out Zatoichi's past to good effect, making him a little less myth and a little more man. But for a character so insistently altruistic, who anguishes when he can't help someone without hurting someone else, the people and situations he ends up involved with so far have been threadbare, and repetitious even this early in the series.

Very good.

Great part of the Zatoichi epic!! More emotional than the other ones!

This third film in the series is the first in color, but is otherwise a consistently average entry in the series.

The story is decent, but so familiar that it loses much of its emotional impact. This one's pretty dull until the big fight at the end.

This installment starts off kind of boring, with a muddled plot that's hard to follow. However, at the halfway point an extraordinary dialogue scene turns it all around and from there on it's pretty awesome, bringing both the emotion and the action. Also, this is where the series changed from B&W to color and while I'm personally partial to the B&W cinematography of the first two I can't deny that the final scenes here look great.

After the bookend style 2nd film, we get a proper new story, meet Zatoichi's sensei and learn more about his past. This is the first color entry in the series and helmed by another director which give it a bit different feel. A lot of the story revolves around Zatoichi reflecting on his way of life and the price that comes with it. The scenes between Ichi and Yayoi were at times too melodramatic for my liking, but it's still a good film and it will be interesting to see how the series continue.