American History

Dec 1, 2021 — Celebrate the holidays with our 21-film Alfred Hitchcock retrospective and a series dedicated to collaborations between female directors and cinematographers.

Nov 30, 2021 — Lost films are not the only tragedy of the silent age. It’s time that we counted up all the forgotten stories, and the overlooked connections as well. The truth is that lost films and lost memories can’t be separated. One...

Nov 23, 2021 — Written and directed by the Safdie brothers, Josh and Benny, as a vehicle for two icons, funnyman Adam Sandler and basketball great Kevin Garnett, Uncut Gems (2019) is breathtakingly profane, alarming, and comic. Most simply described, the movie is one...

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.