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Deep Dives

You look at Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979), and you see the snarky, risky spirit of the New Wave movements that emerged around the world in the 1960s and ’70s in full, defiant bloom. But what does that mean, exactly, ...

In April 1992, John Singleton was en route to the set of his second film when he heard the verdict on the radio. A predominantly white jury had acquitted four police officers who, a year earlier, had been caught on video severely beating Rodney King. The Los Angeles Police Department, which has a long history of racist violence, had once again escaped accountability, enabled ...

As the 1950s began, Kinuyo Tanaka found herself at a turning point. She had been acting in films since she was fourteen, becoming one of Japan’s most beloved, admired, and prolific women stars. Now in her early forties, she saw that leading roles were slipping away from her and faced predictably sexist criticism over her age. Boldly, she set her sights on directing, though th...

During the evening rush on a busy Los Angeles boulevard, a man steps into a news-vendor’s stall and scans the out-of-town papers section, where journals offer balm for homesick travelers and transplants. But his hometown, Evanston, Illinois, is missing—no call for it, the vendor says dismissively, before switching on the lights against the deepening dusk. The stranger flinche...

“The wig has a name. The wig’s name is Pam.”

I was not even a little surprised to hear that Dallas-born filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary had given a name to the bouncy brown bob she wears in her film The Giverny Document (2019). The wig takes on a presence of its own, allowing Gary to embody a talk-show-host persona as she stops Black women on the streets of Harlem to ask...