The Base

Jul 19, 2022 — Our midsummer books roundup opens with one sharp critique and one celebration of American popular culture.

Nov 30, 2021 — Lost films are not the only tragedy of the silent age. It’s time that we counted up all the forgotten stories, and the overlooked connections as well. The truth is that lost films and lost memories can’t be separated. One...

Nov 3, 2021 — 1. Jack Arnold was a prolific genre director over the course of his many years as a filmmaker. He started as a cinematographer in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, and after the end of the war started...

Jun 22, 2021 — The multi-hyphenate artist’s staggering and frequently autobiographical body of work reimagines the depiction of Black people in American culture, encouraging us to question everything we see.

May 27, 2021 — First Person I first watched Yi Yi on a busted cassette tape, in my small Texas town, rented from a Blockbuster behind a rice field and a pharmacy. If you were a high schooler growing up just outside of Houston...

May 12, 2020 — In the early 1950s, director John Sturges, then under contract at MGM, read a condensed version of Paul Brickhill’s memoir The Great Escape, which details the mass escape of downed fighter pilots from the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III...

Mar 13, 2020 — Maybe in tough times we can draw strength from our passion for great cinema.

May 23, 2019 — One family infiltrates another in one of this year’s top critical favorites.

Oct 23, 2018 — Jon S. Baird and his cast offer a winning tribute to Laurel and Hardy.

Sep 3, 2018 — The producers behind our edition of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s masterpiece share stories they discovered from researching the film and the turbulent political climate that inspired it.