Without Memory

Jan 30, 2019 — An exhibition, a film series, and of course, If Beale Street Could Talk are markers of heightened interest in the writer, activist, and cinephile.

Dec 18, 2018 — Half a century before Julien Duvivier made his 1946 film Panique, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon published his influential study of mob behavior, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, in which he argued that recent upheavals in...

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Nov 26, 2018 — Even as he chronicles the downfall of an American family, Orson Welles brings a sense of buoyancy to this grim saga through his virtuoso storytelling.

Oct 29, 2018 — Supporting roles bring potent flavor to classic Hollywood’s darkest genre. In the first installment of a series, Imogen Sara Smith pays tribute to the queen of character actors: Thelma Ritter.

Oct 23, 2018 — Brian De Palma found his home in the psychological thriller with this chilling tale of murder, which twists genre conventions to investigate the perils of looking and the pitfalls of subjectivity.

Oct 18, 2018 — Separated by more than a decade in Ingmar Bergman’s filmography, these two formally masterful dramas uncover the ugliness of male aggression and brutality.

Sep 29, 2018 — This “lean but evocative allegory” can be read in a surprising number of ways.

Sep 12, 2018 — Viola Davis, Robert Redford, and Gael García Bernal star in a cluster of new heist movies.

Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.