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Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert giving two thumbs up.

When the Movies Mattered

Siskel and Ebert and the heyday of popular movie criticism.
by Annie Berke via The Yale Review on June 12, 2024
Artistic photo for black history

The Trouble With Uplift

A curiously inflexible brand of race-first neoliberalism has taken root in American political discourse.
by Adolph Reed Jr. via The Baffler on September 4, 2018
Lyndon Johnson looking unimpressed with what Martin Luther King Jr. is saying.

Feeling Versus Fact: Reconciling Ava DuVernay’s Retelling of Selma

“There has never been an honest movie about the civil rights movement,” says civil rights leader Julian Bond.
by Daniel Judt via The Politic on March 28, 2015
Characters in the 1934 film "The Thin Man."

Fools in Love

Screwball comedies are beloved films, but for decades historians and critics have disagreed over what the genre is and which movies belong to it.
by Andrew Katzenstein via New York Review of Books on August 29, 2024
Scene from The Burning, 1981.

Why Are So Many Horror Movies Set at Summer Camp?

Isolation and a heady mix of hormones and fear provide the perfect setting for bloody revenge.
by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw via Atlas Obscura on June 17, 2024
Marlon Brando on the set of 'One-Eyed Jacks,' 1961.

Brando Unmatched

The legendary actor left a mark in both film history and an industry fraught with self-regard.
by Giancarlo Sopo via The Dispatch on April 27, 2024
J. Robert Oppenheimer lecturing in front of chalkboard.

Oppenheimer’s Second Coming

Japanese were interested when Oppenheimer visited Japan as an honored guest in 1960. Will they be also interested in the Nolan film released today in Japan?
by Gregory Kulacki via Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on March 28, 2024
A still from The Exorcist of Chris, played by Ellen Burstyn, standing next to a priest.

Exorcising American Domestic Violence

The Exorcist in 1973 and 2023.
by Eleanor Johnson via Public Books on December 13, 2023
original

Reviewing the Oppenheimer Reviews

Christopher Nolan's blockbuster has generated a torrent of historical commentary about the birth of nuclear weapons. Is there something missing from the conversation?
by Kathryn Ostrofsky on August 25, 2023
Cillian Murphy in the movie "Oppenheimer."

‘Oppenheimer’ Doesn’t Show us Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's an Act of Rigor, Not Erasure

The movie has no interest in reducing the atomic bombings to a trivializing, exploitative spectacle, despite what some would want.
by Justin Chang via Los Angeles Times on August 11, 2023
Production reference photos of "Wizard of Oz" cast members in their wigs and make-up.

What Hollywood’s Ultimate Oral History Reveals

For all the clouds of publicity, the dream machine is actually a craft business. Have we asked too much of it?
by Adam Gopnik via The New Yorker on November 28, 2022
Screen capture of a Black man standing in an urban residential neighborhood, speaking in the documentary "Who Killed the Fourth Ward?"

How “Who Killed Fourth Ward?” Challenged the Nature of Documentary Filmmaking

James Blue’s film investigated the destruction of a Black neighborhood in Houston, but it is also a powerful self-interrogation.
by Richard Brody via The New Yorker on January 21, 2022
A chipping mural depicting Fred Hampton, subject of the film Judas and the Black Messiah.

History Lessons on Film: Reconsidering Judas and the Black Messiah

Historians should watch films like Judas and the Black Messiah as much for their filmmaking as their history making.
by Nathalie Barton via Perspectives on History on June 3, 2021
Pocahontas characters overlaid onto a landscape.

Deconstructing Disney: Queer Coding and Masculinity in Pocahontas

Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities — and queerness is a useful scapegoat.
by Jeanna Kadlec via Longreads on April 1, 2021
Vincent Price.

The Strange Undeath of Middlebrow

Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.
by Phil Christman via The Hedgehog Review on March 25, 2021
Illustration taken from The Great Gatsby, The Graphic Novel

Greil Marcus Takes a Deep Dive Into "the Stubborn Myth of The Great Gatsby"

An insightful exploration of the ways America has read ‘the Great American Novel.’
by Allen Barra via The National Book Review on July 17, 2020

‘1917’ and the Trouble With War Movies

"Every film about war ends up being pro-war," Francois Truffaut once said.
by Adam Nayman via The Ringer on January 29, 2020

What Should a Slavery Epic Do?

If there’s anything the 2010s taught us, it’s that there is no getting these stories right, no honoring with grace the dead and ghosts.
by Lauren Michele Jackson via Vulture on December 26, 2019

The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords

Why do they have to be such sore winners?
by Alex Pappademas via Medium on December 10, 2019
Soldiers inspecting damaged helmets in a scene from John Huston's 1945 film "The Battle of San Pietro."
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The War Documentary That Never Was

John Huston's 1945 movie The Battle of San Pietro presents itself as a war documentary, but contains staged scenes. What should we make of it?
by Kristin Hunt via JSTOR Daily on December 5, 2019

Fandom: A Star Wars Story

This is about much more than Star Wars—it is about media bias and "information disorder" in the twenty-first century.
by William Proctor via Contingent on December 4, 2019

‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ is a Science Fiction Film

Far from wallowing in nostalgia, Tarantino is using alternative history to critique conventional Hollywood endings.
by Jeet Heer via The Nation on August 23, 2019

Death Proof

With ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,’ Tarantino slakes his thirst for nostalgia while playing with another piece of history.
by Soraya Roberts via Longreads on August 1, 2019

Gump Talk

25 years later, what does Gump mean?
via Contingent on July 1, 2019

“Swinging While I’m Singing”: Spike Lee, Public Enemy, and the Message in the Music

Public Enemy's "Fight the Power," featured in Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing," embodied many sentiments of a black generation.
by Mark Anthony Neal via Black Perspectives on June 24, 2019

How Spaghetti Westerns Shaped Modern Cinema

In the realism, the set pieces, the operatic music, Sergio Leone was pointing the way towards modern filmmaking.
by Quentin Tarantino via The Spectator on June 1, 2019
Film poster for "Native Son."

"Native Son" and the Cinematic Aspirations of Richard Wright

Novelist Richard Wright yearned to break into film, but Hollywood's censorship of black stories left his aspirations unfulfilled.
by Anna Shechtman via The New Yorker on April 4, 2019
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How ‘The Highwaymen’ Whitewashes Frank Hamer and the Texas Rangers

The film’s hero left a legacy of racist violence in Texas.
by Monica Muñoz Martinez via Made by History on March 31, 2019

'Reality Bites' Captured Gen X With Perfect Irony

The 1994 studio film was written by a 20-something who mined her own life to tell the story of a generation that disdained 'selling out.'
by Soraya Roberts via The Atlantic on March 6, 2019

Colorizing and Fictionalizing the Past

The technical wizardry of Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old" should not obscure its narrow, outdated storyline.
by Bridget Keown via Nursing Clio on February 12, 2019
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