The United States of America is a 1975 film by James Benning [1] and Bette Gordon. [2] [3] [4]
A conceptual bicentennial film dealing with spatial and temporal spaces about two travelers in their car alongside the relationships to changes in America (political, social and geographical) from New York to Los Angeles. [5] [6] [7]
The Criterion Channel describes it as "one of the major works of the structuralist film movement of the 1970s". [8]
A remake of the film, also directed by Benning, premiered in 2022. [9] [10]
Night of the Living Dead is a 1968 American independent horror film directed, photographed, and edited by George A. Romero, written by Romero and John Russo, produced by Russell Streiner and Karl Hardman, and starring Duane Jones and Judith O'Dea. The story follows seven people trapped in a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania, under assault by reanimated corpses. Although the flesh-eating monsters that appear in the film are referred to as "ghouls", they are credited with popularizing the modern portrayal of zombies in popular culture.
John Howard Carpenter is an American filmmaker, composer, and actor. Most commonly associated with horror, action, and science fiction films of the 1970s and 1980s, he is generally recognized as a master of the horror genre. At the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the French Directors' Guild gave him the Golden Coach Award and lauded him as "a creative genius of raw, fantastic, and spectacular emotions".
Five Easy Pieces is a 1970 American drama film directed by Bob Rafelson, written by Carole Eastman and Rafelson, and starring Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Susan Anspach, Lois Smith, and Ralph Waite. The film tells the story of surly oil rig worker Bobby Dupea, whose rootless blue-collar existence belies his privileged youth as a piano prodigy. When Bobby learns that his father is dying, he travels to his family home in Washington to visit him, taking along his uncouth girlfriend.
Robert Bresson was a French film director. Known for his ascetic approach, Bresson made a notable contribution to the art of cinema; his non-professional actors, ellipses, and sparse use of scoring have led his works to be regarded as preeminent examples of minimalist film. Much of his work is known for being tragic in story and nature.
Charade is a 1963 American romantic comedy mystery film produced and directed by Stanley Donen, written by Peter Stone and Marc Behm, and starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. The cast also features Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy, Dominique Minot, Ned Glass, and Jacques Marin. It spans three genres, suspense thriller, romance and comedy.
The Criterion Collection, Inc. is an American home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films". A de facto subsidiary of arthouse film distributor Janus Films, Criterion serves film and media scholars, cinephiles and public and academic libraries. Criterion has helped to standardize certain aspects of home-video releases such as film restoration, the letterboxing format for widescreen films and the inclusion of bonus features such as scholarly essays and documentary content about the films and filmmakers. Criterion most notably pioneered the use of commentary tracks. Criterion has produced and distributed more than 1,000 special editions of its films in VHS, Betamax, LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray formats and box sets. These films and their special features are also available via The Criterion Channel, an online streaming service that the company operates.
Hocus Pocus is a 1993 American fantasy comedy film directed by Kenny Ortega from a screenplay by Mick Garris and Neil Cuthbert, and a story by David Kirschner and Garris. It follows a villainous comedic trio of witches who are inadvertently resurrected by a teenage boy in Salem, Massachusetts, on Halloween night.
Rue Morgue is a multinational magazine devoted to coverage of horror fiction. Its content comprises news, reviews, commentary, interviews, and event coverage. Its journalistic span encompasses films, books, comic books, video games, and other media in the horror genre. Rue Morgue was founded in 1997 by Rodrigo Gudiño, and is headquartered in Toronto, with regional offices in various countries throughout North America, the United Kingdom, and Europe. The magazine has expanded over time to encompass a radio station, book publishing company, and horror convention. The magazine's namesake is Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841).
Nostalgia, styled (nostalgia), is a 1971 American experimental film by artist Hollis Frampton. It is part of his Hapax Legomena series.
Structural film was an avant-garde experimental film movement prominent in the United States in the 1960s. A related movement developed in the United Kingdom in the 1970s.
Bicentennial Man is a 1999 American science fiction comedy-drama film starring Robin Williams, Sam Neill, Embeth Davidtz, Wendy Crewson and Oliver Platt. Based on the 1992 novel The Positronic Man by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, the plot explores issues of humanity, slavery, prejudice, maturity, intellectual freedom, conformity, sex, love, mortality and immortality. The film, a co-production by Touchstone Pictures and Columbia Pictures, was directed by Chris Columbus. The title derives from the main character existing to the age of two hundred years.
Maitland McDonagh is an American film critic, writer-editor and podcaster. She is the author of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento (1991) and other books and articles on horror and exploitation films, as well as about erotic fiction and erotic cinema. In 2022, McDonagh was inducted into the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards' Monster Kid Hall of Fame. She is the founder of the small press 120 Days Books, which became an imprint of Riverdale Avenue Books.
Oklahoma! is a 1955 American musical film based on the 1943 musical of the same name by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, which in turn was based on the 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs written by Lynn Riggs. It stars Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Rod Steiger, Charlotte Greenwood, Gloria Grahame, Gene Nelson, James Whitmore, and Eddie Albert. The production was the only musical directed by Fred Zinnemann. Oklahoma! was the first feature film photographed in the Todd-AO 70 mm widescreen process.
Rosemary's Baby is a 1968 American psychological horror film written and directed by Roman Polanski, based on Ira Levin's 1967 novel of the same name. The film stars Mia Farrow as a newlywed living in Manhattan who becomes pregnant, but soon begins to suspect that her neighbors are members of a Satanic cult who are grooming her in order to use her baby for their rituals. The film's supporting cast includes John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Maurice Evans, Ralph Bellamy, Patsy Kelly, Angela Dorian, and Charles Grodin in his feature film debut.
Cinephilia is the term used to refer to a passionate interest in films, film theory, and film criticism. The term is a portmanteau of the words cinema and philia, one of the four ancient Greek words for love. A person with a passionate interest in cinema is called a cinephile, cinemaphile, filmophile, or, informally, a film buff. To a cinephile, a film is often not just a source of entertainment as they see films from a more critical point of view.
Amy Taubin is an American author and film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment. She has also written regularly for the SoHo Weekly News, The Village Voice, The Millennium Film Journal, and Artforum, and used to be curator of video and film at the non-profit experimental performance space The Kitchen.
Benjamin Schiff Platt is an American actor and singer. The son of film and theater producer Marc Platt, he began his acting career in musical theater as a child and appeared in productions of The Sound of Music (2006) and The Book of Mormon (2012–2015), rising to prominence for originating the title role in the Broadway coming-of-age musical Dear Evan Hansen (2015–2017). His performance in the latter earned him multiple accolades, including the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical, the youngest solo recipient of the award at the time, in addition to a Daytime Emmy, and Grammy Award. Platt reprised the role of Evan Hansen in the 2021 film adaptation of the musical, produced by his father. He then played Leo Frank in the 2022 New York City Center Gala production of Parade, which transferred to Broadway in 2023 and earned him nominations for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical and the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album.
Alexander Jonathan Lawther is an English actor, writer, and director. He made his professional acting debut originating the role of John Blakemore in Sir David Hare's South Downs in the West End. He made his feature film debut playing a young Alan Turing in the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game (2014), for which he received the London Film Critics' Circle Award for "Young British Performer of the Year" and was declared one of BAFTA's 2015 Breakthrough Brits.
Jennifer Reeder is an American artist, filmmaker, and screenwriter. Her short film A Million Miles Away (2014) was nominated for a Tiger Award for Short Films at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and screened at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Short Narrative Films category. In 2003, she had a solo screening at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She received a Rockefeller Grant for New Media in 2002 and a Creative Capital grant in 2015 to support the production of her first experimental feature-length film, Knives and Skin. She won a 2018–19 SFFILM Rainin Grant for scriptwriting, and was the 2019 recipient of the Alpert Film Award residency at the MacDowell Colony. In 2021, she was awarded a United States Artists (USA) Fellowship.
Bette Gordon is an American filmmaker and professor at Columbia University School of the Arts. She is best known for her films Variety (1983) and Handsome Harry (2009), both of which received critical acclaim in North America and abroad.