Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai

1635. Hanshiro Tsugumo arrives at a samurai house and asks permission to commit seppuku. The retainer tells him what happened to Motome Chijiiwa, who came a year earlier with the same request: taken for a man angling for money while his child starved, he was humiliated and forced to die with a bamboo blade. Why Hanshiro has come emerges at the end of that account. Takashi Miike directed. It is a remake of Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 Harakiri, shot in 3D, and became the first 3D film to compete at Cannes. Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote the score. Jeremy Thomas and Toshiaki Nakazawa produced, the same pair behind Miike's 13 Assassins in 2010. Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice described it as a melodramatic deepening and a grisly doubling-down of Kobayashi's great original. Who it is for: viewers who like samurai films and the idea of honour put on trial. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot sit through the bamboo blade. The film shows it long and direct and gives you nowhere to look.