2/5 A weak rehash
  by Donald A. Prentiss (minneapolis, mn United States)
I thought I was going to be all for an attractive girl to step up to refresh the Zatoichi franchise and then I saw this. The lead actress was a super weak representation of the series super bad sword slinger. The action is weak, the direction is weak and the story is boring with a slow pace that did not hold my interest no matter how cute I thought the lead actress was, while watching this I found myself continuing to get up and do other things and I am a huge fan of this genre and have been for years. I was extremely disappointed.

4/5 Razor sharp and cutting edge
  by Ian Williams (Sunderland, UK)
Historical samurai dramas are the Japanese equivalent of the Western except that they still maintain their credibility. This is a reworking of the popular Zatoichi the blinds swordsman series, with a blind female musician trying to track down the person who may or may not be Zatoichi and who may or may not be her father.

I like the structure as more and more is revealed about the two main characters over the course of the film through the use of flashbacks which can, early on, sometimes be misleading. Toma, the samurai whom Ichi protects, at first appears to be nothing more than a coward but he is more than that and there are resonances which I don't want to spoil. The two leads are absolutely fine in their roles, the cute kid who helps Ichi is bearable, but the villains tend to be over the top. In particular the chief bad guy comes over like a psycho samurai Quentin Tarantino, whom he rather resembles.

It's attractively photographed with several striking snow scenes. There is a strong emotional content and lots of brooding silences, profundities, and deep thoughts -this is a samurai movie after all. There's even more blood, lashings and lashings of it as our heroine wades through the bad guys using her special backhanded slicing technique. The climax features even more blood and carnage with bad guys against good guys, hero against villain, heroine ag... ah, that would be telling.

I had a good time watching this. Sequel, please.
I have the UK edition. It's in Japanese with English subtitles. No extras apart from a trailer.