Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Director: Jim Jarmusch

1999 / 116min / 35mm

Forest Whitaker’s Ghost Dog isn’t your run-of-the-mill Cosa Nostra hitman: he’s a devoted bibliophile who scrupulously follows the samurai code as laid out in Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s 18th-century Hagakure, and spends his idle hours tending to his pigeon coop, which you’d be wise not to mess with. Throwing in a heaping helping of homages to France’s pre-eminent fetishist of American film noir, Jean-Pierre Melville, a dash of Japanese chanbara, and a fistful of Italian poliziotteschi, signaled by the presence of genre stalwart Henry Silva, Jarmusch’s cross-cultural mix-and-match is a very hearty mulligan stew indeed.

Distributor: Janus Films

Part of Sukiyaki Bebop