American History

Nov 18, 2021 — Brief notes on films arriving from Mike Mills, Tatiana Huezo, Jane Campion, Robert Greene, and Radu Jude.

Nov 17, 2021 — Decades after Peter Lorre’s knife-toting creep Hans Beckert prowled the Berlin streets in search of little girls in Fritz Lang’s M (1931); after Robert Mitchum’s silver-tongued Harry Powell cut down all the “smooth and curly-haired things” he could get his...

Oct 22, 2021 — Sexuality—how one defines it, lives with it, hides it, shuns it, or wields it—is inextricable from matters of socioeconomic class, though rare is the American film that centralizes this intersectional reality. Americans have long been encouraged to buy into the...

Oct 15, 2021 — This week: Visconti, Bertolucci, Sumiko Haneda, Lynne Sachs, and designer Barbara Baranowska.

Oct 13, 2021 — Several of the season’s best-reviewed films arrive in the Windy City.

Oct 12, 2021 — One of cinema’s most eclectic and impactful curators is fêted in the cities were he lived and worked.

Oct 4, 2021 — Mills winningly enlivens the old tropes of a story we’ve seen a thousand times before.

Oct 1, 2021 — This week we’re celebrating Haile Gerima, reading the new Cinema Scope, and listening to Julie Delpy.

Sep 29, 2021 — It’s National Silent Movie Day—and the Pordenone Silent Film Festival opens on Saturday.

Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles takes aim at Hollywood’s way of representing race in this blistering satire about a white man who wakes up one morning to discover that he has turned Black overnight.