Jun 9, 2021 — Lois Weber was Hollywood’s leading female director in the 1910s and 1920s. But also: she was one of the great directors of the silent era regardless of gender, a filmmaker of remarkable vision who exerted an exceptional degree of creative...

May 2, 2017 — On a trip to the Library of Congress’s Mostly Lost workshop—affectionately known as “film-geek heaven”—Imogen Sara Smith joined early-cinema aficionados in uncovering treasures from the vaults.

Nov 5, 2015 — Julien Duvivier’s early sound films offer emotionally rich explorations of life in prewar France.

May 10, 2016 — Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place imbues the conventions of film noir with a subtle, tense vulnerability that lends a naturalistic weight to the film’s powerful emotional impact.

May 27, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so commonplace that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. Movies, however, reveal this action as more than just the original mode of getting from here to...

May 22, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so common that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. But when this action appears in a movie, it is revealed as more than the original mode...

Nov 25, 2020 — “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a fatal abyss.” Wanda in The White Sheik (1952) I have a vivid memory from the first film-studies class I enrolled in, a class on Italian neorealism, where the weekly...

Jun 11, 2018 — Building on a rich lineage of gothic fairy tales and noirish melodramas, this lavishly stylized curio has an ominous beauty all its own.

May 6, 2024 — Perhaps the most hard-to-categorize of the great Hollywood studios came into its own with a string of critically acclaimed films based on popular books and plays, including Born Yesterday, A Raisin in the Sun, and From Here to Eternity.

Apr 12, 2017 — British director Jack Clayton elicited landmark performances from a host of great ladies of the cinema, including Maggie Smith, Deborah Kerr, and Anne Bancroft.