Dec 3, 2012 — Everyone is talking about Daniel Day-Lewis’s riveting, persuasive performance as Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. We’re also quite fond of Henry Fonda’s classic turn as a much greener version of the sixteenth president, in John Ford’s masterful and subtle...

Feb 11, 2009 — In honor of the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, we’ve revisited John Ford’s great portrait of the leader as a preheroic man, Young Mr. Lincoln, and picked this clip to mark the moment. The beauty of it, we...

Apr 16, 2020 — Performances If Richard Milhous Nixon, the thirty-sixth president, continues to inspire a morbid fascination in some of us, the reasons for this extend beyond the obviously exceptional aspects of his career—his reelection in 1972, one of the largest landslide victories...

Jan 17, 2020 — Of all the weird scenes that populate seventies science-fiction cinema, the most bizarre might be in 1971’s The Omega Man. Based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the film imagines a world in which fallout from a distant war has...

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Jul 1, 2026 — BAM’s thirteen-film series dips into chapters of American history that tend to get overlooked on Fourth of July weekends.

Jul 19, 2024 — We’re looking back to films by Pakula and Oshima, and from the 1990s, by Claire Denis and Richard Shepard.

Jul 15, 2020 — When I first saw The Lady Eve (1941), in my teens, I was certain I had never seen a comedy more perfectly constructed, a judgment that the subsequent decades have not revised. I had also seen none more acutely witty,...

Jul 24, 2018 — A feast of sumptuous color and cinematic imagination, Powell and Pressburger’s postwar masterpiece is also a powerful reckoning with recent history.

Apr 9, 2018 — “Most famous for the exquisite 1979 family classic The Black Stallion, and, to a slightly lesser extent, 1996’s Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin-starring drama Far Away Home, [Carroll] Ballard is—despite making only six films in a period of almost forty...