A work of structural and thematic brilliance, Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low does not involve samurai or journeys into Japan’s distant past to create relevant historical parallels, as the director’s pi...

The Player opens with a crane shot that lasts over seven minutes, all filmed as one long take, much of it improvised, during which each moment sets up the film’s many plotlines and characters. The sho...

In Nashville, Robert Altman takes pieces of country music tesserae and assembles a sprawling mosaic that, grouted by the history and music of the Tennessee capital, reflects and anticipates the presen...

An early scene in The Untouchables sets the stage for how director Brian De Palma establishes a nostalgic idyll, and then shatters it throughout the film. In 1930, just under the El train in Chicago’s...

John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, an adventure about gold prospectors in Mexico, voyages into dark places where greed corrupts men and leaves them overcome by suspicion and paranoia, and...

An urgent and aggressive reflector of American culture’s distrust for its government.

Somewhere in space, a haze of dormant satellites orbits the not-so-blue planet Earth. Beneath the planet’s rusty outer atmosphere stand ancient skyscrapers, and beside them, towers built from cubes of...

Finding Nemo contains an unlikely theme for an animated family film. Through the course of this gorgeously assembled adventure, the film’s audience experiences the natural world as a dangerous and unf...

A battle between cinema and television has raged since the earliest monochrome broadcasts became popular in American homes during the 1950s. When the cathode ray tube first flickered images on small s...