Princess Blade - Region 0 DVD

Yukio is one of the assassins of the house of Takemikazuchi, a group of exiled royal guards from a neighbouring kingdom who have created a life in the isolated low-tech kingdom Japan has become in some near future. She is in fact the last of the original Takemikazuchi family, who have gradually been marginalised and murdered. Informed of this and on the run from her fellow swordsmen, she takes refuge with, and falls for, Takashi, an assassin of a more modern kind, an alienated young man whose concern for his retarded sister sits uneasily with his bomb-making. The film moves steadily from explosions of passionate action beautifully choreographed to quiet intense moments of stillness, ending ambiguously on the latter. It is a superior film in its genre because it coherently questions the values and actions it celebrates. --Roz Kaveney