TheRetroCritic

That Hiroyuki Sanada has been wasting his time lately with underwhelming Hollywood blockbusters like The Wolverine and 47 Ronin is criminal, especially when you know he can be as good as he is in 2002's The Twilight Samurai . Now, don't get excited, no vampire samurais here. No, this is a proper samurai flick in which we follow Sanada's low-level samurai Iguchi as he goes home every evening to be with his daughters and his sick mother following the untimely death of his wife. The people around him mock him, nicknaming him "Twilight Seibei", he even gets in trouble for not taking care of himself, his clothing and his appearance enough, yet he isn't miserable: he enjoys seeing his daughter grow up day by day and he has very little ambition besides giving up being a samurai eventually and living a peaceful life as a farmer. The film is set at a time when the Japanese feudal system was transitioning to a more modern one and the old samurai ways were start