The Choice

Jun 17, 2014 — The brutal lessons of Vietnam remained in America’s national consciousness for a generation. September 11 gave us collective amnesia, and they’ve had to be learned again.

Jun 26, 2013 — On the life and work of the famous Czech author, and the pleasures and challenges of translating him.

Jun 14, 2010 — All writing is travel writing, the axiom goes. And for Jim Jarmusch, perhaps more than any other filmmaker working today, all movies are travel movies. It’s not a slight to call him the epitome of the filmmaker as tourist. In...

Dec 18, 1989 — Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s musical was the first to present a panoramic history of America from the Mississippi levees of the 1880s to the Broadway of the 1920s.

Feb 12, 2021 — In an interview with bell hooks published in 1996, Camille Billops responded to a question about the transgressive candor of her films by saying “It is probably exhibitionism on my part [. . .] some people say our films have...

Mar 25, 2019 — In early 2007 the UCLA Film & Television Archive received a call from Hollywood Film and Video announcing that the lab was, sadly, closing—and clearing its vaults in two days’ time. Anything left was doomed to the dumpster. The next...

Nov 13, 2018 — Turning to theater for inspiration, Kenji Mizoguchi transformed a popular eighteenth-century play into a spiritually charged meditation on forbidden love and societal oppression.

Jun 26, 2018 — John Waters’ favorite among his early works is both an assault on political correctness and a no-holds-barred expression of gay militancy.

Aug 20, 2001 — Preston Sturges’s generous-hearted satire achieves a synthesis that is both terribly funny and deeply moving.

Apr 23, 2001 — Released in late 1938, Alexander Nevsky was not only the first sound film to be directed by Sergei Eisenstein, but the director’s political comeback as well. This most famous of Soviet artists had not completed a movie since The Old...