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...

Harold and Maude is the most positive expression of counter-culturalism to come out of Hal Ashby’s career. Unlike Ashby’s other pictures released during his zenith in the 1970s, it does not concentrat...

Kelly Reichardt’s films focus on the searching, inward experiences of her characters, but none more so than her first true Western, Meek’s Cutoff, whose theme is etched in the opening shots. One of se...

Made at the height of Reaganism, Lost in America follows the well-heeled Los Angeles couple, David and Linda Howard, played by Albert Brooks and Julie Haggerty. The first scene finds David lying awake...

A metaphysical and narrative maze, The Shining has been watched like so many films by Stanley Kubrick, through waves of deliberation and reconsideration. Although initially reproached for its lack of ...

Frank Capra kept an earnest faith in the American Dream. As a Sicilian immigrant, America had been good to him; he treasured the idealistic pledge of liberty and justice for all. During Capra’s height...

Two desperate, battle-worn samurai evade their pursuers in a thick marsh. They hunker down, keeping out of sight in the tall reeds until the men on horseback give up their chase. After catching his br...

Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles confronts the reality that, under the dominant patriarchal structure of most films, cinema rarely acknowledges the stagnation of ...

“Wake up!” announces Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Señor Love Daddy, a disc jockey in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, the setting of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The first line, which...