Furious action speaks louder than words in “The Last Samurai,” Edward Zwick’s handsome, intriguing if not wholly satisfying new period piece starring Tom Cruise as an American visitor to ...

“The Last Samurai” isn’t a star vehicle; it’s a star tricycle. Tom Cruise plays a disillusioned, booze-sozzled Civil War vet, circa 1876, hired out to teach the eager-to-Westernize ...

The Last Samurai is reverently nuts. It is a western, fundamentally, and in a tradition of genre pictures about former Indian hunters who learn to think like the “savages.” ...

From his feisty friendships with the likable Zebulon Gant and Simon Graham, to his witty, one-sided conversations with his samurai guard, Algren allows the ancillary characters to blossom around him.