American History

A groundbreaking visual stylist, this iconic American director has captivated generations of film lovers with his meticulously crafted epics about war, violence, and history.

Robin D. G. Kelley is a professor of history at the University of California Los Angeles. His books include Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination; Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times; Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times...

Tom Gunning is Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is the author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press, 1991) and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and...

Ian Christie is a film historian, curator, broadcaster, and professor of film and media history at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written and edited many books on Russian, British, and American cinema—including Arrows of Desire: The Films of...

Dec 25, 2008 — Robert Rossellini’s efforts to put history into images would yield some forty-two hours of “didactic” movies, mostly for television.

Aug 24, 2026 — “American Dream was the hardest film I ever made,” Barbara Kopple recently told me. That’s saying a lot for the pioneering documentarian’s multidecade career, in which she’s taken on such subjects as war reporters, mental illness, gun control, and, most...

Jul 27, 2026 — Some read Thomson’s new book as an attack on cinema; others argue that they’re missing the point.

Jun 12, 2026 — We’re hunkering down with an oral history of Steven Spielberg and reading about Mary Harron, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Radu Jude, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

May 28, 2026 — Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà present two series back to back, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and History, Italian Style.

Apr 16, 2026 — This month, take a peek at movie history through the prism of the ’80s: our collection of the decade’s best remakes and the originals that inspired them reveals an era of wild reinventions and sly revisionism.