"Actor: Yumiko Shaku"

• Princess Blade | DVD | (23/09/2002) from £14.98   |  Saving you £0.01 (0.07%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Shinsuke Sato's The Princess Blade is, in some respects, a standard Japanese action adventure with a lot of swordplay and repayment of blood debts; but it differs in that it stretches the formula in interesting ways. Its moody angst is turned up to full power and it has a twilit elegiac quality, a sense of the sadness of things, which is at once very Japanese and very stylish. 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

• Sky High | DVD | (25/07/2005) from £7.42   |  Saving you £8.57 (115.50%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Yumiko Shaku (who made a big splash in 'Princess Blade') stars as Izuko the Gatekeeper at the ""Gate Of Hatred""; a portal that stands at the netherworld which separates this world from the afterlife. She gives three choices to the dead (who are either victims of an accident or a murder) who visit her: to abandon their hatred and reach the eternal paradise; to haunt the world of the alive as a ghost; or to avenge themselves and go straight down to Hell... Ryuhei Kitamura's typically o