American Movie

Apr 24, 2015 — Atypical in style and subject, Yasujiro Ozu’s early crime dramas show a future master brilliantly experimenting with camera and editing.

Nov 11, 2014 — Like so many famous filmmakers, Monte Hellman got his start thanks to Roger Corman, the groundbreaking American movie maverick. We brought these two legends together for a conversation for our new release of Hellman’s existential 1966 westerns The Shooting and...

Jul 17, 2014 — When I was in high school in the late ’70s, one of my closest pals was a semiprofessional magician. A top-flight pianist as well, Charles was making some tidy sums as an entertainer in restaurants and clubs around North Jersey...

Jan 21, 2014 — Bigger is better in Stanley Kramer’s crazily crammed slapstick epic, a timeless showcase for comedy genius.

Nov 12, 2013 — Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig create a luminous, romantic portrait of a young woman looking for fulfillment in New York City.

Apr 17, 2012 — When it was first released in 1977, ¡Alambrista! depicted something previously unseen in American fiction films—the lives of undocumented Mexican immigrants from their point of view. Though writer-director-cinematographer Robert M. Young was not Latino and didn’t speak Spanish, his film convincingly...

Apr 6, 2012 — Did You See This? • Looking through Keyhole with Guy Maddin • A stunning Rear Window time-lapse panorama • He likes words. • Watch Kubrick’s first three docs. • Is Leo McCarey’s Ruggles of Red Gap “the most patriotic American...

Jan 17, 2012 — At once a political epic and a radical gesture in personal filmmaking, Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic is an unexpected, unlikely triumph. It was a film that Hollywood didn’t want to make—every studio in town turned it down—that went on to secure...

Nov 29, 2011 — Elephant Boy: Child’s Play It’s hard to imagine a movie role more perfectly suited to the actor playing it than Toomai in Elephant Boy (1937), the part that made Selar Shaik—known as Sabu—one of the least likely superstars in Western...

Nov 28, 2010 — “What we need are good old American—and that’s not to be confused with European—Art Films.” So declared the then twenty-nine-year-old beatnik Method actor Dennis Hopper in an unpublished 1965 manifesto. “The whole damn country’s one big real place to utilize...