In America

Jun 13, 2005 — Ernst Lubitsch was a big-city director. The historical dramas that he made in Germany in the late 1910s and early 1920s were known around the world for their distinctively urbane approach, focusing on the private lives of public people. This...

Sep 30, 1992 — The unprecedented popularity of this gender-bending sex farce inspired two sequels, a hit Broadway musical, and at least one transvestite nightclub.

Feb 29, 1988 — Marx Brothers aficionados have argued for years over the relative merits of A Night at the Opera and the “purer” Marx movies such as Duck Soup. Certainly there’s no comparison on a point-by-point basis: Duck Soup is a classic of...

Feb 1, 1988 — Charles Laughton’s classic has the feel and the force of an American folk fable; yet, it also mixes rural humor with gothic humor, biblical quotation and Freudian symbolism, and everyday realities with a near-mythic confrontation between the forces of good...

Dec 9, 1985 — Movie thrillers may come and go, but after half a century, Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps still reigns supreme. And not only for the sheer, breathless excitement of the story; the seamless construction; the chilling, beautifully realized atmosphere; and the...

Oct 8, 2018 — A vibrant movie theater in the college town of Missoula, Montana, takes the spotlight in the Criterion Channel series Art-House America.

Jun 12, 2017 — Informed by his work in theater and his travels through rural America, Nicholas Ray brought an outsider’s perspective to genre filmmaking in his debut feature.

Judith Mayne is an emerita professor at Ohio State University whose areas of research interest are French cinema and feminist film studies. She is the author of eight books, including Directed by Dorothy Arzner (1994) and Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and...

May 31, 2022 — Wayne Wang’s breakthrough feature, a milestone in Asian American cinema, is a humorous and intimate snapshot of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Apr 14, 2015 — Preston Sturges revealed a lot about himself and the movie business in this hilarious and socially committed comedy.