Outstanding action and performance; lots of blood.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 28, 2010

It's easy to stand back and wax ironic about The Last Samurai. But it's not all that difficult to succumb to its full-spirited romanticism either.

Full Review | Aug 25, 2008

Competently mounted in its studiedly immersive, elongated way, Zwick's earnest costume epic dresses a knee-jerk, reactionary sensibility in exotic garb.

Full Review | Jun 24, 2006

As brisk as it is rich, The Last Samurai is much more fun than a mere history lesson.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 1, 2006

The Last Samurai is an idyll in which the savageries of existence are transcended by spiritual devotion. That's a beautiful dream, and it gives the film a deep pleasingness, but the fullness of life and its blackest ambiguities are sacrificed.

Full Review | Aug 7, 2004

Zwick is attracted to the notions of victory in defeat and the romantic purity of self-sacrifice. His film is, however, a trifle earnest and overlong.

Full Review | Jan 15, 2004

Disappointingly content to recycle familiar attitudes about the nobility of ancient cultures, Western despoilment of them, liberal historical guilt, the unrestrainable greed of capitalists and the irreducible primacy of Hollywood movie stars.

Full Review | Dec 23, 2003

It's ultimately a Tom Cruise movie in a way that, say, Eyes Wide Shut, for better or worse, was not.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 16, 2003

There are pleasures to be had in the handsome, heroic The Last Samurai. But they're all on the surface.

Full Review | Dec 16, 2003

The script lays on hokey narration and bombastic dialogue.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 12, 2003

Even though The Last Samurai is brutal, exhausting and so not my kind of movie, it is extremely well-made and undeniably engrossing.

Full Review | Dec 10, 2003

The film laughably draws good guy-bad guy distinctions with the objective of mythologizing the samurai, but in the end, those distinctions don't mean much.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 7, 2003

A benumbed epic with an action figure for a hero.

Full Review | Dec 6, 2003

But where the visuals astound, the story is lacking. It gets the pulse racing and asks tough questions to be sure, the picture just doesn't know what to do with either once they are produced.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 6, 2003

Despite its intelligent agenda, swollen heart and fabulously epic surface, amounts to a didactic banality: a white guy's politically correct lesson abroad.

Full Review | Dec 5, 2003

It's wannabe-ism on a multimillion-dollar scale, with an icon of Japanese culture somehow crudely penetrated by an interloper and turned inside out.

Full Review | Dec 5, 2003

It looks great in a costume spectacle way, and it has some truly terrific action sequences.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 5, 2003

As movie-star vehicles go, Last Samurai is a fine, well-crafted example.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 5, 2003

Cruise's undeniable star voltage makes it all palatable, and the film is gorgeous to behold and even to listen to.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 5, 2003

Cruise isn't horribly miscast, a la Tony Curtis in The Son of Ali Baba or John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror, but he doesn't miss by far.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 5, 2003