Clint Eastwood's 1992 Academy Award winner "Unforgiven" has undergone a Japanese remake. "Yurusarezaru Mono" — starring Ken Watanabe, Akira Emoto, Koichi Sato and Yuya Yagira (the best-actor winner at Cannes when he was 12; he's 23 now) — is loyal to Eastwood's classic Western but adds a pulsating core of Japanese-ness. It's a movie heavy with sentiment and crammed with violence, recalling Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" minus the humor.

The director is Zainichi Korean filmmaker Lee Sang-il ("Hula Girls," "Akunin [Villain]"), renowned for being a ruthless perfectionist. At the premiere screening in Tokyo earlier this month, Emoto commented that Lee could "harass an actor without mercy in order to get the precise desired frame." To this, Lee laughingly replied, "I take that as a compliment. Persistence in a director is a good thing."

Despite the cheery mood at the premiere, the content of "Yurusarezaru Mono" (which literally translates as "Unforgiven") is anything but. Watanabe plays Jubee Kamata (the equivalent to Eastwood's Will Munny character), a retired samurai who was on the wrong side during the early stages of the Meiji Restoration and was consequently pursued all the way to Hokkaido by the newly established government military forces. Jubee was hunted but not killed — he survived by murdering everyone in his path, including, according to in-film legend, an entire village of women and children.