Directed by Alexander Payne • 2013 • United States
Starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb

When an increasingly disconnected-from-reality father (Bruce Dern) and his estranged adult son (Will Forte) embark on a journey from Montana to Nebraska to claim a (nonexistent) million-dollar sweepst...

Directed by James Gist and Eloyce Gist • 1930 • United States

HELL-BOUND TRAIN is arguably the most significant rediscovery in Pioneers of African American Cinema. The film is the work of self-taught filmmakers James and Eloyce Gist, African American evangelists who employed cinema as a tool for...

Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis • 1999 • United States
Starring John Earl Jelks, Michelle A. Banks, Nirvana Cobb

A poignant portrait of Deaf African Americans and the complexities of love at both ends of the twentieth century, Zeinabu irene Davis’s film is a groundbreaking story of inclusion and...

Directed by Sidney Lumet • 1975 • United States
Starring Al Pacino, John Cazale, Charles Durning

On a sweltering August day, novice criminals Sonny (Al Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale) attempt to rob a Brooklyn bank in order to pay for Sonny’s lover’s gender confirmation surgery—a situation that qu...

Directed by Victor Masayesva Jr. • 1984 • United States

Made to commemorate the Hopi tricentennial, this groundbreaking work of Native American documentary cinema is a lyrical evocation of Hopi philosophy and mythology told through the storytelling of elder Hopi historian Ross Macaya. Setting hi...

Directed by Spencer Williams • 1946 • United States
Starring Francine Everette, Don Wilson, Katherine Moore

In an unauthorized retelling of W. Somerset Maugham’s short story “Miss Thompson,” Francine Everette stars as Gertie La Rue, a nightclub entertainer who arrives at a Caribbean resort to en...

Directed by Rob Nilsson and John Hanson • 1978 • United States
Starring Robert Behling, Susan Lynch, Joe Spano

Winner of the Camera d’Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, NORTHERN LIGHTS is one of the most moving and committed works of political cinema from the 1970s. Dramatizing the formation o...

Directed by Joseph Lerner • 1950 • United States
Starring Zachary Scott, Faye Emerson, Mary Boland

Set in a seamy milieu of cheap flophouses and skid-row social castoffs, this evocatively scuzzy B noir stars Zachary Scott, in one of his rawest and most compelling performances, as Max Thursday, a...

Directed by Oscar Micheaux • 1925 • United States
Starring Paul Robeson, Mercedes Gilbert, Lawrence Chenault

Although the 1920s brought him acclaim as a stage actor and singer, Paul Robeson still had to prove himself as a viable screen performer. Mainstream avenues were limited, however, and his...

Directed by Oscar Micheaux • 1931 • United States
Starring Tim Moore, Andrew Trible, Amon Davis

As a filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux was something of a firebrand, but his attitudes and methods were anything but predictable—often leveling criticism at certain strata of the African American community. H...

Directed by Howard Hawks • 1939 • United States
Starring Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Rita Hayworth

Electrified by crackling dialogue and visual craftsmanship of the great Howard Hawks, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS stars Jean Arthur as a traveling entertainer who gets more than she bargained for during a ...

Directed by Howard Hawks • 1932 • United States
Starring Paul Muni, Ann Dvorak, Osgood Perkins

One of the most talked-about movies of its time, the original SCARFACE is a hard-hitting, ripped-from-the-headlines story of organized crime’s brutal control over Chicago during the Prohibition era. Pa...

Directed by Oscar Micheaux • 1931 • United States
Starring Eunice Brooks, Stanley Morrell, Nora Newsome

THE EXILE is the earliest surviving sound feature by an African American filmmaker. Director Oscar Micheaux responds to the arrival of sound with a change in his visual style, indulging in len...

Directed by Werner Herzog • 2009 • United States
Starring Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer

Two of contemporary cinema’s most electrifying eccentrics, Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage, join forces for a thoroughly unhinged pulp fever dream. Not—despite the title—a remake of or sequel to the si...

Directed by Richard Wallace • 1947 • United States
Starring Glenn Ford, Janis Carter, Barry Sullivan

A bad pair of brakes strands gruff, takes-no-BS trucker Mike (Glenn Ford) in a small town where the locals aren’t all that friendly—save for blonde bartender Paula (Janis Carter), who soon has hi...

Directed by Nicholas Ray • 1950 • United States
Starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame

When a gifted but washed-up screenwriter with a hair-trigger temper—Humphrey Bogart, in a revelatory, vulnerable performance—becomes the prime suspect in a brutal Tinseltown murder, the only person who ca...

Directed by Harold Clurman • 1946 • United States
Starring Susan Hayward, Paul Lukas, Bill Williams

This strikingly stylized psychological thriller boasts a remarkable pedigree: written by Clifford Odets, based on a novel by noir icon Cornell Woolrich, and lensed by famed cinematographer Nichola...

Directed by Werner Herzog • 1976 • West Germany
Starring Josef Bierbichler, Stefan Güttler, Clemens Scheitz

In the late eighteenth century, a Bavarian village succumbs to madness as the townsfolk search for the secret to creating the unique ruby glass that is their lifeblood, lost to them whe...

Directed by Werner Herzog • 1977 • West Germany
Starring Bruno S., Eva Mattes, Clemens Scheitz

Werner Herzog’s tragically absurd tour through 1970s America stars the singular Bruno S. as an ostracized, alcoholic Berlin street musician who, joined by a prostitute (Eva Mattes) and his eccentric el...

Directed by Werner Herzog • 1997 • Germany

Dieter Dengler, a German-American Navy pilot who was shot down over Vietnam in 1966, recounts his experiences as a POW in a Vietnamese prison, tortured and starved until fear and desperation compelled him to make daring escape. Travelling to Laos and Th...

Directed by Nancy Savoca • 1993 • United States
Starring Tracey Ullman, Vincent D’Onofrio, Lili Taylor

Based on the novel by Francine Prose, Nancy Savoca’s wonderfully warm chronicle of a spirited Italian American New York family gracefully balances humor, tragedy, and pathos. Vincent D’Onofrio’...

Directed by Howard Hawks • 1938 • United States
Starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Charles Ruggles

What do you get when you combine Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, a missing dinosaur bone, and a leopard named Baby? One of the all-time great American comedies! Grant is the stuffy paleontologi...

Directed by St. Clair Bourne • 1983 • United States, United Kingdom

In a vital career forged in the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, activist documentarian St. Clair Bourne chronicled overlooked Black American cultural histories with an incisive, illuminating eye. In THE BLACK AND THE GREEN, B...

Directed by Werner Herzog • 1984 • West Germany

Focusing on a group of Nicaraguan Miskito Indians embroiled in a civil war against the Sandinistas they once called allies, BALLAD OF THE LITTLE SOLDIER takes an intimate look at the conflict from the perspective of the children being used by the M...