The Heart of a Nation

Apr 21, 2022 — In 1948, leftist filmmaker Leo Hurwitz directed a documentary whose title summed up the uncertainty of its moment: for America’s antifascists, the end of the Second World War was a Strange Victory indeed. Using newsreels from the war’s front lines,...

May 19, 2021 — For the last twenty years—until the pandemic broke my streak—I drove each fall to spend a week at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Before making the trip, I took care to avoid reading anything about the subjects, characters, or...

Oct 12, 2017 — Last week, after years of rumors and aborted attempts to bring it to light, Hollywood’s “open secret” finally became a story fit to print. On Thursday, October 5, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey reported for the New York Times that...

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...

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.

Apr 28, 2026 — As the 1950s began, Kinuyo Tanaka found herself at a turning point. She had been acting in films since she was fourteen, becoming one of Japan’s most beloved, admired, and prolific women stars. Now in her early forties, she saw...

Oct 4, 2019 — When I met Ann Carter in 2007 during the filming of a documentary about Hollywood producer Val Lewton, she was seventy years old, more than six decades removed from her starring role in Lewton’s The Curse of the Cat People....

Feb 12, 2018 — In “Twin Peaks: The Return, or What Isn’t Cinema?,” a four-part essay at Reverse Shot, Nick Pinkerton first stakes out a position. Referring to one of Marcel Duchamp’s most famous pieces, he writes: “For a hundred years now it’s been...

Jan 16, 2018 — The ravages of poverty in contemporary Britain are translated with vivid authenticity in this drama from celebrated filmmaker Ken Loach.

Jul 17, 2017 — “Steven Spielberg laid claim to the Normandy beach landing,” begins Variety’s Peter Debruge, “Clint Eastwood owns Iwo Jima, and now, Christopher Nolan has authored the definitive cinematic version of Dunkirk. Unlike those other battles, however, this last was not a...