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With a distinctive style that blends elements of realism and experimentation, Los Angeles native Dwyane LeBlanc explores themes that are deeply personal to him, including identity, distance, and responsibility. While speaking with him about his work, I discovered that the virtues that make him a bright light among his young generation of filmmakers surface quickly in conversa...


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Has there ever been a more aptly named film than The Man Who Wasn’t There? The title character, Ed Crane, is as pale and insubstantial as the long ash on his ever-present cigarette. A barber by trade, he is laconic to a fault, with the kind of face that a client doesn’t recognize mere hours after a haircut. He has no vices. (Smoking isn’t a vice in 1949 Santa Rosa, Cal...


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“In this twilight of the capitalist epoch,” mused Michael Harrington, the socialist writer and journalist, in 1976, “there is a decline in religious commitment, in moral conviction, indeed in almost any kind of belief. The old order has died in the realm of the spirit long before the new order has occurred in the realm of politics and the economy.”

Harrington’s observat...


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The cinema of the United States, perhaps more than that of any other nation, has acted as its own infinity mirror, its images perpetually bouncing back and forth off one another. At the confluence of the Wild West era and the industrial dawn of the seventh art, the country’s identity and its nascent moving-image culture formed a symbiotic relationship, blurring the lines betw...


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A prolific Hollywood veteran who made an indelible mark at Warner Bros. in the 1930s, Mervyn LeRoy is not widely known as a particularly personal filmmaker. Today, much of his reputation rests on one wholesome classic he produced—The Wizard of Oz (1939)—as well as a string of glossy literary adaptations he directed in the following decades, including Quo Vadis (...


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