American History

Feb 10, 2012 — The Chef whips up a sweet treat, using a recipe from a star of one of his favorite films in the collection, Wes Anderson’s candy-colored The Royal Tenenbaums.

Apr 28, 2010 — Just over halfway through Ang Lee’s masterful Civil War drama Ride with the Devil, the small group of men at the story’s center, young, Southern-sympathizing Bushwhackers fighting in divided Missouri, meet up with other ragtag bands of rebels. Coalescing under...

Apr 28, 2008 — The simplicity and emotional clarity of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 The Red Balloon have made it one of the most beloved films of all time. The narrative is deceptively airy and pared down: Pascal, a young Parisian boy, retrieves a balloon...

Mar 18, 2003 — Director William Dieterle’s 1941 film adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is a melodramatic fever dream, a hallucinatory tour de force.

Sep 17, 2001 — Elmar Klos and I usually work as equal partners, but in this case he left me a free hand. He knows that I am not thinking of the fate of all the six million tortured Jews, but that my work...

Sep 11, 2020 — On our minds this week: New Taiwan Cinema of the 1980s, Black cinema’s “paradoxical role in American cultural history,” the new Brooklyn Rail, and more.

Dec 15, 1986 — It has been estimated that one out of four feature films made in America before the mid-1960s was a western. Since approximately 35,000 features were released in this country in the 70 years after the introduction of film, this would...

Gerard Jones was once a writer of comics and animation. More recently, he has written Men of Tomorrow, a cultural history of American comics, and Killing Monsters, a defense of some of the scarier elements of popular culture, both from...

Saul Austerlitz is the author of Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy.

Michael Koresky is the senior curator of film at Museum of the Moving Image; cofounder and editor of the online film magazine Reverse Shot, a publication of MoMI; the author of Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the...