American Gangster

Jan 13, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s characters play an endlessly layered game of dress-up in this tale of sadomasochistic love.

Nov 29, 2019 — American gangsters, Chinese filmmakers, and a Czech animator are featured in this week’s round.

Jan 14, 2016 — For the lead role of Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, a melancholy neonoir that fused Wenders’s New German sensibility with classic Hollywood drama, the director needed an actor who could convey menace with complexity. Wenders had his...

Feb 20, 2018 — David Bordwell has revisited The Donovan Affair (1929), “Columbia’s first all-talking picture, and Frank Capra’s as well.” It’s “an unusually fluid early talkie” and studying it teaches us “some things about those transitional years 1928-1932, when filmmakers were figuring out...

Jan 10, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki made a breakthrough with his second feature, a yakuza thriller full of devil-may-care assurance and try-anything imagination.

Oct 18, 2004 — Nixon as Hamlet, Nixon as Lear, Nixon as Blanche DuBois, Nixon as Krapp—clutching every last tape to his breast with the wild fury and despair of a man on the precipice . . . Nixon in his study, poring over...

May 25, 2023 — One of the first hit movies made by an Asian American team, They Call Me Bruce confronts everyday racism with irreverent humor emblematic of its era.

Mar 24, 2026 — In this true-crime epic, Martin Scorsese combines his career-long exploration of amoral gangsterism with a sobering meditation on what it means to live on American soil.

Feb 19, 2026 — Though in many ways the quintessential company man, the director brought an intimate understanding of the margins of American society to the films he made for Warner Bros. in the 1930s.

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.