Nov 25, 2013 — He massages, he gambles, and he’s great with a blade. Who is this blind swordsman, anyway?

Mar 31, 2026 — Violently nihilistic, simultaneously energizing and crushing, Tsui Hark’s remake of the martial-arts classic One-Armed Swordsman captures the zeitgeist of pre–1997 handover Hong Kong.

Dec 11, 2009 — This expansive tribute to the iconic Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai was first published on the Criterion Collection’s website in fall 2005, around the time of the Criterion releases of two films starring Nakadai: Kurosawa’s Ran and the less well-known samurai...

Maggie Lee is a curator of Asian cinema and chief Asia film critic for Variety. She has contributed as English editor and translator to the Hong Kong Film Archive’s publications, including The Swordsman and His Jiang Hu: Tsui Hark and...

Sep 14, 2016 — Asian-cinema expert Tony Rayns unpacks the significance of Zatoichi’s name and the strict social hierarchy that the character so gleefully upends.

Jan 20, 2026 — This month, leap into a century of cinema’s greatest stunts, feel the ache of thwarted romance and bittersweet yearning, or get into trouble with the Depression-era hustlers of Mervyn LeRoy’s pre-Code films.

Sep 18, 2025 — This month’s programs offer a feast of horror, including a John Carpenter retrospective and a collection of the most terrifying films of the 2000s.

Jul 7, 2021 — In the 1990s, Hong Kong was home to a staggering number of the most gifted and charismatic actors in the world. It’s impossible to imagine the films of Wong Kar Wai—or the global art-house phenomenon they generated—without these extraordinary performers;...

Mar 25, 2026 — The Harvard Film Archive celebrates the first decade of work by a key figure of the Japanese New Wave.

Nov 12, 2025 — He anchored some of the best films by Kurosawa, Kobayashi, Okamoto, Naruse, and Teshigahara.