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A serious action movie on an epic scale, The Warrior should please fans of samurai dramas and the kind of populist international masterpieces made by David Lean and Akira Kurosawa in the 1950s and '60s. Director Asif Kapadia uses imposing landscapes, lean storytelling, and minimal dialogue to convey broad, overarching themes of redemption. Though set in a specific historical period in the Indian Rajasthan desert and Himalayan Mountains, the film seems to take place in the abstract past of folklore. The titular warrior is Lafcadia (Irfan Khan), part of a group of sword-wielding thugs who terrorize, rape, and pillage on behalf of a local warlord. After nearly decapitating a girl while destroying a village, he has a vision of his boyhood home in the mountains, and decides to give up violence and return there with his son. The warlord sends the remaining warriors to kill them. Lafcadia is a complicated character whose past actions make it nearly impossible to forgive or feel compassion for, but Khan's gripping performance is amazingly bold and graceful. His face seems to contain a thousand conflicting crystal clear emotions and it's telling that, in a film filled with dramatic long shots, Kapadia decided to open the movie with an extended tight close-up on Khan's eyes. (After its release, this film made Khan a global star.) Throughout The Warrior there are intermittent bursts of violence, and an increasing buzz of tension as Lafcadia nears his home and his pursuers draw closer. But this tension is deflated in favor of a pacifist message that rejects the allure of violence. This is a movie where simple actions dictate the awesome influence each character wields. The extremities of this world may be foreign to most people, but the struggle for a complicated salvation it chronicles is not.