13 Assassins

As an action movie, 13 Assassins ranks among the best in recent memory, and puts the flaccid products pushed out by Hollywood the past few years to shame.What raises the action to the level of art, though, is the skill director Takashi Miike uses to make each battle uniquely compelling. Some of the ways he does it are obvious: a lot of blood spilled in 13 Assassins, but every drop of it that gets splattered across the screen is an integral part of the story being told. It never feels gratuitous. Some of Miike’s style is more felt, than seen. During one of the bigger fight scenes where the assassins are facing off against 10 times as many bad guys, you may not even notice the way the director stops using any music and lets the clash of the swords (and the squishy sound of blood gushing out of sword wounds) be the soundtrack to the scenes.