Retro Reels

Hanna continues to torture herself with shoddy movies featuring Asian stereotypes. Don't worry, there's a point to all of this suffering.

Ending the year with much less than a bang, Hanna watches a movie so racist and so sexist that she might have hated it even more than she hated Memoirs of a Geisha for similar reasons.

Feeling obligated to make a seasonal choice, but generally allergic to anything billed as a Christmas movie, Hanna goes with the most obnoxious possible option. Yippee-ki-yay...you know the rest.

Over the top is the name of the game when it comes to John Woo. Unbelievably, his 1992 film Hard Boiled technically started out as an effort to tone things down.

Hong Kong director John Woo was one of a long list of filmmakers to feel inspired by Jean Pierre Melville's film Le Samourai. His take on it, however, has quite a different vibe.

Hanna looked into French director Jean Pierre Melville's take on the samurai warrior so often seen in the films of Akira Kurosawa and finds herself pleasantly surprised, not least of all by how hot the leading man happens to be.

One Week in the West is the program's new series that'll see Hanna spend a week analyzing a film made in the Western world...partly due to realizing that after about a year and a half, she's been working through Asian film so quickly that it's probably best to mix things up a bit.

This week, Hanna watched Akira Kurosawa's 1961 film Yojimbo, a samurai film so cool that he saw his entire story stolen wholesale.

Kurosawa's two for two on works that redefined storytelling as we know it. His 1954 film, Seven Samurai, is rightfully considered one of the greatest movies ever made.

Several years since her first viewing back in college, Hanna revisits Akira Kurosawa's legendary 1950 film Rashomon...was it quite like she remembered it?