Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

• Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is an arresting new serio-comedy from Jim Jarmusch: a blackly comic mix of martial arts and mafia wise guys with an intriguing unlocatability of tone. Forest Whitaker plays the professional killer Ghost Dog with glacial, massive seriousness. Enjoyable, distinctive and sui generis, it takes a cool, highly sophisticated angle on cinema gangland.

• Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is an exciting, prescient, moving, and noble failure that I wouldn't care to swap for even three or four modest successes. It is essentially a poetic comic fantasy that has a lot to say about contemporary global culture; it’s beautifully cast and filmed with cinematography by the matchless Robby Müller.

• Ghost Dog is profoundly weird. His profound sadness, which permeates the touching Whitaker performance, comes from his alienation from human society, his loneliness, his attempt to justify inhuman behavior with a belief system that has no connection with his life or his world. Jarmusch is mixing styles here almost recklessly and I like the chances he takes. By the end, Whitaker's character has generated true poignance. The result is weirdly intriguing.

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