The best Katana (Japanese sword) films

A good Japanese sword film lives on two things: the tension before the duel and how fast the single cut that ends it lands. Japanese cinema calls the genre chanbara, after the sound of clashing blades. The best of them show the guard, the distance and the instant one swordsman commits, which anyone who trains in kenjutsu or iaido will recognise.

The golden age is the period film (jidai-geki) of the 1950s and 1960s. Akira Kurosawa made the two titles best known in the West: Rashomon (1950), winner of the Golden Lion in Venice in 1951, which tells one crime through four witnesses, and Seven Samurai (1954), in which Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura defend a farming village against bandits. Seven Samurai set the template of the team of fighters recruited one by one, reused in dozens of films since.

From the 1970s the genre travelled. Quentin Tarantino paid tribute to chanbara and Hong Kong cinema in Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), with the fight against the Crazy 88 at the House of Blue Leaves, and in Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004). 47 Ronin (2013), starring Keanu Reeves, turns the true story of the forty-seven samurai of Ako, who avenged their lord in 1703, into a fantasy film.

Start with Seven Samurai: it runs over three hours but lays down the whole grammar of the genre. Then watch Kill Bill: Volume 1 to see what Hollywood took from it.