Before the attack on Pearl Harbor that finally convinced American isolationists to join World War II, Hollywood studios concealed their criticism of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in stories that exposed t...

In The Big Country, Gregory Peck plays Jim McKay, a former sea captain who retires from his family’s shipping business to marry and settle down on the Western frontier. Unlike the generic gunslingers ...

The Best Years of Our Lives blends Hollywood melodrama and restrained, observational form to treat its subject with critical realism and humanity. William Wyler’s film captures the lives of three retu...

Most Marx Brothers comedies suffer from the same problem. They contain passing moments of hilarity tied together by an obligatory story. Every pun, double-entendre, non-sequitur, witticism, and wordpl...

Portrait of Jennie opens with a strange and remarkable sequence. A voice introduces the story and its themes, alternating between humanity’s grand questions about time, space, and mortality, and then ...

Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days opens on a tank of fish resting on a table cluttered with dishes, a newspaper, and a cigarette burning in an ashtray. As a hand reaches for the smoke, th...

Hailed for “out-thrilling the wildest thrills,” Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 classic King Kong delivers an essential component of Hollywood cinema: escape. Released during the dog ...

Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love adopts the structure of a memory, where rapturous moments overcome the traditional flow of time, preserved by desire and accessed when longing calls upon the experi...

Spike Lee’s Bamboozled begs the question: When does artistic representation stop being a creative force and become something destructive? Released in 2000 to divisive assessments from both critics and...