Prolific Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike tackles the samurai genre with Hara-Kiri: Death Of A Samurai, remaking a film which the legendary critic Roger Ebert listed as one of his great movies, Masaki Kobayashi's Harikiri. Miike made the unusual tradition to shoot Hara-Kiri: Death Of A Samurai in 3D, surprising considering that there's very little in the way of flamboyant use of the medium, with most of the film taking place in the courtyard of a samurai clan's estate. A samurai arrives at their door requesting an honourable death by suicide, but as his story unfolds an ulterior motive soon becomes clear. Heavy on talk for most of its running time, Hara-Kiri might be a slow burner but the final pay-off, which places the various lengthy monologues into a new context, is a real killer.
