An Independent Life

Dec 6, 2023 — American Fiction, May December, and Past Lives lead with five each, and Showing Up has already won the Robert Altman Award.

Aug 29, 2023 — Exalting Black women’s self-invention with DIY effervescence, Drylongso (1998) is a gorgeously generous study of friendship, creativity, violence, and survival. The multidisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith developed the idea for the project from her habit of taking Polaroid photographs. Shot on...

Jul 11, 2023 — In her audacious debut feature, Cheryl Dunye blends romantic comedy and staged archival material to explore love, friendship, and early U.S. cinema’s history of exclusion.

Jun 20, 2023 — Two young San Francisco residents navigate the potential for romance and their opposing views on race in Barry Jenkins’s moving debut feature.

Aug 30, 2021 — An electrifying voice in American independent cinema, the filmmaker, artist, and DJ Ephraim Asili believes that moving images can revolutionize our perception of the world. His body of work attests to this conviction. Since he began making films more than...

Jan 11, 2021 — Apted’s lasting legacy will be the Up series, one of the most moving and influential works of nonfiction ever made.

Nov 10, 2020 — In the half-light of the opening shot of Girlfriends, a woman asks, “What are you doing?” and another responds, “Go back to sleep.” You could dismiss this as a bit of passing dialogue—or you could see in it a larger...

Aug 17, 2020 — Louise Brooks, Oliver Stone, James Stewart, Andy Warhol, and more are here to help relieve this year’s summer doldrums.

Jan 9, 2020 — The UCLA Film & Television Archive presents a series of films bearing aesthetic and political similarities to the Italian neorealist classics of the late 1940s.

Dec 12, 2019 — Almost from the moment it arrived on screens in early 2006, Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy was celebrated as a new milestone for American cinema, even an expression of independent filmmaking’s delayed arrival at maturity. In relating its deceptively simple tale...