The Arch

Aug 24, 2010 — I n a photograph of Josef von Sternberg from 1937, he looks like a character from one of his own films: a turbaned magus with elegantly trimmed beard and mustache, holding a cigarette as he gazes out obliquely, with the...

May 20, 2009 — The title alone screams incongruity. Shohei Imamura’s 1961 black-and-white caper movie Pigs and Battleships bursts with the confusion and exuberance of a cross-cultural encounter. In its lively portrayal of enthusiastic Japanese locals welcoming the U.S. Navy on R&R to the...

May 26, 2003 — Transcription of a speech given by long-time Derek Jarman collaborator and friend, actress Tilda Swinton

Feb 19, 2001 — Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s romance film spins a web of myth and evocative symbolism around its central search for self-discovery.

Nov 22, 1999 — Grand Illusion is the masterpiece that earned Jean Renoir enormous acclaim in the United States, exciting the admiration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and running for 26 weeks in New York after its opening in September 1938. Banned in Italy...

Mar 22, 1993 — Elizabethan prodigal prodigy Christopher Marlowe, whose tantalizingly brief life ended in political assassination, wrote a history play, in the mid-1590s, about the 1327 political assassinations of England’s Edward II and his lover and boyhood friend, Piers Gaveston. Rarely performed, Edward...

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

Oct 23, 2020 — A new Senses of Cinema, free access to the NYRB archive, and the return of drive-in theaters are among this week’s highlights.

Aug 31, 2017 — As part of a Marlon Brando series, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive screens the film that won the actor his first Oscar, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront.

Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University and the author of several books, including Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Music Archive (NYU Press).