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.

May 21, 2025 — The exiled American director of Try and Get Me! and Hell Drivers depicted crime and violence as the inevitable results of capitalist competition.

Aug 8, 2017 — This underappreciated highlight of Michael Curtiz’s filmography grapples with postwar disillusionment and marital strife through the prism of a daylight noir.

Apr 21, 2022 — In 1948, leftist filmmaker Leo Hurwitz directed a documentary whose title summed up the uncertainty of its moment: for America’s antifascists, the end of the Second World War was a Strange Victory indeed. Using newsreels from the war’s front lines,...

Jan 10, 2020 — How do movies work? It’s a question that seems to have been on more than a few minds this week.

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 So declared the then twenty-nine-year-old beatnik Method actor Dennis Hopper in an unpublished 1965 manifesto.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...

Oct 9, 2020 — In Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, veteran French journalist Philippe Garnier brings to life an enchantingly raffish community of typewriter-pounders who headed west to try their luck in the verbal gold rush set off by the...

Sep 21, 2016 — An exhilarating blend of noir and splatter-flick tropes, the Coen brothers’ debut feature established their unique brand of cosmic fatalism.

May 30, 2024 — The season brings new biographies of Ingmar Bergman and Elaine May, a novel by Miranda July, plus interviews, excerpts, and podcasts

May 14, 2024 — Few filmmakers had a greater impact on the shape and direction of American cinema in the 1960s and ’70s.