An ‘auteur’ is another name for the chief creative mind of a film

Alma Reville was Hitchcock’s wife—and his secret weapon

Alfred Hitchcock is rightfully considered an important figure in film history, but to call him an “auteur” minimizes a significant figure in his filmography: Alma Reville, his wife, assistant director, and collaborator. Reville contributed to his work in many ways, and Hitchcock would say she had given him “the most affection, appreciation, encouragement, and constant appreciation.”

What it means to call something 'Lynchian'

David Lynch was one of American cinema's most influential directors. He brought a singular, unsettling vision to the silver screen. Critics, however, have trouble pinning down what it means when other artists try to recreate that vision. This essay untangles his influence, tracing the word "Lynchian" back to its earliest utterances and attempting to define a notoriously slippery term.

Exploring how directors decide where to place the camera

The seamless experience of watching a film is the result of countless aesthetic decisions, one of the most important of which is the placement of the camera taking the shot. In this 8-minute video, directors and actors weigh in on the factors that shape the angles of cinematography, using famous scenes to demonstrate their observations. Watch it here.

The 'Movie Brats’ ushered in a new era of Hollywood

"The Movie Brats" is a name used to describe a generation of directors who blended classic cinema with the rebellious, crowd-pleasing spirit of rock ‘n’ roll. The figures most often associated with the tag are Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Brian De Palma.

Only 9 directors have won Cannes’ top prize more than once

Cannes’ Palmes d’Or award is one of the highest distinctions in film. The select few who have earned the award more than once include the most iconic names in filmmaking, including Francis Ford Coppola, Billie August, and Emir Kusturica.

Japanese horror is often more psychological than its Western counterpart

One of the country’s most famous directors is Masaki Kobayashi, who won a Special Jury Prize at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival. Unlike his Western peers, Kobayashi’s films avoid jump scares or gratuitous gore, opting instead for slow-burning psychological explorations that are just as terrifying.

Defining an indie film

Indie movies have a definite history, but the use of the word by contemporary audiences can be vague. This brief explainer goes into a few tiers of indie film and a quick historical overview.

The people behind the indie film studio A24

The movie "Everything Everywhere All At Once" has dominated at the box office and in awards shows, the latest in indie film studio A24's string of cult favorites. This absorbing piece reports on what makes A24's executives distinct from other...

The Oscars now prohibit AI-generated acting and writing

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences added language to its rules and eligibility requirements stating that only roles "demonstrably performed by humans with their consent" and screenplays "human-authored" would be eligible for awards.

Principals are important pieces of F1 teams

In the Big Four American sports, teams have a head coach to lead the team and a general manager to run the business side. In Formula 1, they have a team principal, who speaks publicly on behalf of the team, manages the team's personnel, and engages with F1's governing body.

There are several theories for how the Oscar got its name

Several different people claim to have bestowed the famous nickname, including a librarian who thought the knight resembled her uncle Oscar and a gossip columnist who was poking fun at a local theater owner.

An ad agency is a firm that a company contracts to assist with marketing efforts

While some corporations have marketers and advertisers as full-time employees, others contract advertising agencies to get the work done. Ad agencies typically have a variety of departments depending on their specialty, but they often include account executives to help manage client relationships and a creative department to produce the ads.

What is the creator economy?

The creator economy is a system powered by people creating online content for monetizable audiences. These “creators” and “influencers” make money off their digital audiences through brand deals or revenue shares with social media platforms.

A deep dive into Christopher Nolan's 'Odyssey' adaptation

The "Oppenheimer" director's take on Homer's epic might be the most anticipated movie of the summer. Dockterman's profile of Nolan explores how he's become a Hollywood rarity: a director who balances box-office numbers and critical acclaim.

Critics often use the word ‘Shakespearean’ to describe a dramatic story

Calling something “Shakespearean” often denotes a high-quality work of art or a story that recalls one of the Bard’s plays.

An affineur is the person in charge of aging cheese to perfection

Their duties can include washing the rind with a salt solution, monitoring mold growth, adding herbs, and more. An affineur can take care of their cheeses from anywhere between a few months to several years.

The board game Risk was created by an Academy Award-winning screenwriter.

Sartre panned 'Citizen Kane'

Jean-Paul Sartre was primarily known for his philosophy, fiction, and drama, but he was also a critic. In 1945, he wrote a rather negative review of Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane," deriding Welles' decision to tell the story in the past tense, writing, "film in the past tense is the antithesis of cinema. Therefore 'Citizen Kane' is not cinema."

The Beats autobiographical impulse is still influential

The Beats autobiographical approach to literature is seen in contemporary autofiction. While autofiction emerged as a literary term in the 1970s, its philosophy has several antecedents, including Colette’s Claudine novels, Marcel Proust’s "In Search of Lost Time" and Beat writer Jack Kerouac’s "On the Road."

David Simon on writing for TV

Few people have done more to define HBO—and American television—than David Simon, creator and writer for “The Wire,” “Treme,” “Show Me a Hero,” and other shows. In this interview, Simon explains how he approaches a script and what he believes TV writers should aim to do beyond entertainment.

'Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.'

- Author James Joyce (1882 -1941)

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

A look at Sikh actor and designer Waris Ahluwalia

Waris Ahluwalia has acted in many films, including Wes Anderson's "Darjeeling Limited" and "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," two classics from the cult favorite filmmaker. Read this brief inspiring piece on Ahluwalia's experience that defies...

Artist Raphael was one of the three supreme masters of the High Renaissance

Raphael was a prolific and versatile painter who worked as a sponge, adopting the practices of other great painters while making them his own. Thanks to his creating many iterations of the same scene, we can analyze how his mastery evolved over his career.

Michelin judges act as anonymous restaurant inspectors

Go behind the scenes with Gwendal Poullennec, international director of The Michelin Guide and the man who oversees all those anonymous inspectors. This short video dives into who the inspectors are, the training process, and what they look for in a meal.

What is a whodunit?

The whodunit is a subgenre of the mystery genre that opens with a crime and invites readers (or, in the case of movies and television, viewers) to attempt to solve the mystery alongside the protagonist detective. This guide to the form breaks down its history, conventions, and contemporary impact. As a bonus, it also offers a reading list of some of the best whodunits in history.

The first horror movie is believed to be George Méliès' 1986 short 'The Haunted Castle,' which pioneered the use of special effects

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

Art theft is the third-largest source of criminal revenues worldwide, thanks in part to the subjective nature of valuing a work of art.

Hotels in Cannes, the glamorous city on the French Riviera, hire hawks to ward off seagulls during the city's famous film festival.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, but became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

Apeirophobia is an overwhelming fear of living forever, perhaps stemming from the brain's inability to conceptualize an infinite life.

The term 'algorithm' originated from the Latinized name of al-Khwārizmī, a 9th-century mathematician whose works introduced Arabic numerals and the decimal-based numeral system to Europe and whose treatise 'Al-Jabr' gave algebra its name.

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

Clever Hans was a 1900s horse that was believed to be able to solve math equations, tell time, and read and comprehend German, until a psychology student discovered how he got his answers.

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

Sony set the standard for cylinder-shaped batteries when it repurposed manufacturing equipment used to make rolls of magnetic recording tape.

One of the most famous portraits ever taken is 'Afghan Girl' (1984) by Steve McCurry, yet the subject Sharbat Gula went much of her life without being identified or benefitting from the image's success.

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

See the 25 of the best photos of auroras from around the world.

One disco producer saw 'Star Wars' four times on its opening weekend and was so inspired that he recorded the album 'Star Wars and Other Intergalactic Funk,' which produced a chart-topping single.

The word 'jazz' evolved from 'jasm,' 19th-century American slang for 'energy'

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

While atoms are normally made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, exotic ones have been built with antimatter—alternate versions of normal matter that live for fractions of a second and are about a billion times as rare.

Visualize how CRISPR-Cas9—a type of immune system used by single-celled organisms to attack invasive viruses—targets and makes precise changes to a gene's DNA.

Ebola is a filovirus, meaning it resembles a thread under a microscope, though it sometimes twists and can resemble a bowl of spaghetti.

After her fellow cult members tried to kill her with an LSD-infused hamburger, one member of the Manson Family, the murderous cult led by Charles Manson, decided to testify against the group's leader.