This is the Bond movie they should have made all along. Casino Royale brings the James Bond franchise to where it always needed to be; it's to Bond what Batman Begins (or perhaps Batman: Year One) was to that comic-book hero. If they never make another Batman movie I will not be unhappy, and if they never make another Bond film I will always have this one. Harlan Ellison once lavished praise on one of Philip Jose Farmer's stories in his Dangerous Visions collection by saying that it was "the best--no, make that the finest story in this book." That degree of praise was tailor-made for this film, as it's both the best and the finest of the Bonds thus far.

There is a moment near the end of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs when the main character, Keiko (Hideko Takamine), a Tokyo bar hostess, is asked if she loves someone, and her response is: “I neither love him nor hate him.” Keiko has spent so much of her time and strength purging herself of emotion that when real love is finally offered to her, she has no idea what to do with it. For most of her adult life she has perched on barstools next to middle-aged men of all stripes—bankers and office-workers and industrialists—and poured their drinks and pretended to be more wifely to them than their actual wives. She has done this for years out of the hope that maybe she’ll be able to sock away enough money to open up her own bar—which, aside from marriage, is about the most a woman in her situation could expect to find. And, she reasons, who would want to marry her? Surely no one who is entirely honest with themselves.

Baian the Assassin is an above-average example of the sort of TV fare that’s popular in Japan but not an animated production, which is what most American audiences are used to as far as such Japanese imports go. It’s something to file next to stuff like the Zatôichi movies or TV series, and it’s directly reminiscent of it in many ways: A man of a certain social status dispenses his own brand of justice in feudal Japan and makes sure the wicked come to a sticky end. In this case, the hero’s no a blind masseur, but a doctor, Baian-sensei (Ken Watanabe, whom most of us will know from The Last Samurai), whose clinic is always crowded with those in need of his aid. His other job is that of an assassin, where he uses his acupuncturist’s needles to inflict a death blow to those who have ground the innocent and helpless underfoot.

The fun thing about Baian (which, again, like Zatôichi, was adapted from a series of novels) is how it depicts its main character and relishes the little details of its setting just as much as the big ones. Baian gets all of his assignments through a go-between, the motojime, who pays him piles of money and describes his targets to him. If he doesn’t take the job, he can always give it to his friend Hikojiro, the toothpick maker—another assassin-by-night, whose killing specialty is a blowgun dart to the eye. Most of those marked for death are haughty samurai, but there are more than a few greedy merchants—both male and female—who get marked for one of Baian’s needles in the back of the neck.