Oct 26, 2017 — Professor David Bordwell uses the economically expressive performances of Jules Dassin’s Brute Force as an object lesson for breaking down the fundamentals of screen acting.

Apr 16, 2007 — Jules Dassin’s noir is arguably the meatiest and most resonant prison film ever made in Hollywood, drawing explicit parallels to the Nazi encampment experience.

Jul 18, 2013 — Repertory PicksThe Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is currently celebrating one of the finest of all Hollywood actors with the retrospective A Burt Lancaster Centennial Tribute. This Saturday, July 20, you can catch an early breakout performance of Lancaster’s...

Apr 14, 2025 — This month’s programming brings seaside thrills and white-knuckle tension, noir classics from a politically repressive era in American history, early gems from Kathryn Bigelow, and guest-curated picks from Spike Lee.

Oct 16, 2024 — This month, celebrate Noirvember with a dazzlingly dark lineup of hard-boiled pleasures.

Oct 24, 2023 — This November, learn the art of the con from some of cinema’s craftiest swindlers, or saddle up alongside some of the most complex and determined female characters in the history of the western.

Apr 9, 2021 — Uncovering “The Naked City,” Bruce Goldstein’s scintillating chronicle of The Naked City’s groundbreaking New York location shoot, is more than the best “where-they-filmed-it” doc ever made. As Goldstein wittily traces director Jules Dassin’s Gotham roots and influences, this twenty-three-minute documentary—now...

Oct 27, 2017 — In the wake of Christopher Nolan’s war epic Dunkirk, one of the most widely celebrated and commercially successful films of the summer, we’re revisiting the filmmaker’s no-less-inventive low-budget beginnings in this week’s Short + Feature, now streaming on the Criterion...

Mar 25, 2015 — Long unheralded and at last rediscovered, actor-director Robert Montgomery’s Ride the Pink Horse is one of the key Hollywood features of 1947, the year film noir flooded the screen like a ruptured reservoir of India ink. Adapted from the popular...

Jan 27, 2026 — Unencumbered by the white gaze, Reginald Hudlin’s groundbreaking feature-film debut is a celebration of a Black community in all its diversity, featuring fully realized characters who exist not as spectacle but as reality.