May 24, 2011 — In 1938, Charles Chaplin deposited with the Library of Congress a script for a film to be called The Dictator, and told the press it was a project in which he would play a double role. He clearly had Hitler...

Sep 5, 2019 — Critics split three ways: Joker is just plain great, or great but dangerous, or dangerous and also really quite bad.

Jun 5, 2026 — Despite what is often assumed about the history of trans representation in cinema, it is not a simple story of marginalization and stigmatization. In their 2024 book Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema, critics...

May 18, 2022 — Just slightly northwest of Death Valley, in what is now eastern California, a mountain range carves out the eastern edge of the Owens Valley. Sculpted by bedrock pushed between tectonic faults during the late Proterozoic to Cambrian periods, the Inyo...

Sep 22, 2021 — Writer-director John Huston blasted the fusty pieties that pervaded big-studio filmmaking in the post-Code era, whether as the progenitor of film noir with The Maltese Falcon (1941) or the brainy daredevil who threaded critiques of frontier capitalism, gold lust, and...

Oct 3, 2019 — By the time Charlie Chaplin was making The Circus, from 1925 into 1928, his production company was a smooth-running organization. Numerous problems plagued the comic during the shoot—scratches on the first month of rushes, a fire that damaged the studio...

Dec 20, 2016 — With only three features under her belt, German director Maren Ade has become one of contemporary cinema’s keenest observers of human behavior.

May 21, 2026 — The Cannes sidebar wraps with prizes for three stories about teenage girls and another about a determined adult woman.

Jun 6, 2025 — Wes Anderson celebrates Satyajit Ray, Chantal Akerman talks framing, and Callie Hernandez writes about Jonathan Glazer.

Mar 28, 2025 — The week brings new issues of Film Quarterly and Cineaste and conversations with Michael Mann and Miguel Gomes.