A young man heeds the call of adventure in Yoshinari Nishikori's Tatara Samurai, leaving his idyllic village to become a soldier. He soon has second thoughts — but violence is coming his way, like it or not, in a movie that sometimes echoes its hero's ambivalence by toying with viewers' expectations of swordslinger cinema. Genre fans should respect the picture if not embrace it wholeheartedly, but...