American Dreamz

Mar 29, 2021 — Channel Calendars Next month, the Criterion Channel ups the ante with a collection of some of the greatest films ever made about the pulse-racing highs and gutter-dwelling lows of gambling. We’re also dealing out the Marx Brothers’ anarchic comedies, sublime...

Jan 8, 2013 — The two movies that opened the door to “youth culture” in Hollywood, The Graduate and Easy Rider, were milestones, to be sure. But can it really be said that they were milestones in the art of cinema? “I think The...

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...

Sep 30, 2025 — Made with a formal control unparalleled in modern American cinema, the films of this utterly distinctive auteur seek to contain and understand an uncontainable, unknowable world.

Apr 6, 2022 — A playfully philosophical drama, My American Uncle has been largely forgotten, yet it is the most down-to-earth of the French master’s exhilarating engagements with modernist aesthetics.

Jun 6, 2017 — The veteran documentary filmmaker behind Hoop Dreams and the recently released Abacus: Small Enough to Jail discusses the ways in which Robert Altman’s masterpiece combines epic scope with intimate detail.

May 9, 2005 — Les Blank’s documentary examines the interaction of premodern tribal existence with European modernity, epitomized by a movie narrative about the invidious clash of brute nature and a singular ego bent on his own mission of cultural enlightenment.

Aug 19, 2025 — This month’s programming celebrates the centenary of the great American filmmaker Robert Altman, the career of Oscar-winning actor Jodie Foster, and much more.

Jun 17, 2025 — Drawing from over a dozen hours of black-and-white footage, Direct Cinema pioneer Charlotte Zwerin created this elliptical and moving portrait of one of American music’s most original artists.

May 21, 2025 — The exiled American director of Try and Get Me! and Hell Drivers depicted crime and violence as the inevitable results of capitalist competition.