The American Friend

Sep 13, 2022 — Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou’s portrait of an undocumented Chinese immigrant working in New York City captures a suspenseful human drama with a DIY, documentary-like approach.

May 31, 2022 — Wayne Wang’s breakthrough feature, a milestone in Asian American cinema, is a humorous and intimate snapshot of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Feb 23, 2022 — Twenty-nine nonfiction and hybrid films will screen through March 10.

Feb 9, 2022 — The Learning Tree may have been Gordon Parks’s first feature film as a director, but by the time filming began in the fall of 1968, Parks already had almost three decades of experience behind a camera. In 1940, the self-taught...

Sep 22, 2021 — Wes Anderson collects his favorite New Yorker stories, and Werner Herzog has written his first novel.

Aug 31, 2021 — Cary Joji Fukunaga’s devastating child-soldier movie unflinchingly captures the shock of war without forsaking the complexity of human experience.

Feb 22, 2021 — Labor films are not where one typically goes when seeking love and grace. They are more often concerned with bodies subjected to torsion and the furrowed brow of someone who knows the cupboards are growing bare. Then there are the...

Dec 20, 2019 — This week we’re spotlighting directors’ and writers’ appreciations of other directors and writers, plus Céline Sciamma and Agnès Varda.

Nov 26, 2019 — In a key scene of the beloved Bette Davis film Now, Voyager (1942), the heroine goes to dinner on a cruise ship wearing a cloak decorated with fritillaries. A fritillary is a spangled butterfly, and the scene signals that Charlotte...

Nov 15, 2019 — It’s a strange feeling: adoring cinema while at the same time always sensing that it’s not made for you. This is how I felt growing up, at least. I came of age watching movies, crushing on them so hard that...