On first encountering the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, a free black man drugged and kidnapped from an educated, domestic life by opportunistic slave-traders in Washington D.C., director Steve McQueen felt he had read the “[A...

Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space. I felt it in the new film Gravity; I knew what it was like to be set adrift in outer space. Not the series of half-understood, embellished images in a century of movies and books,...

Given that both the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine and the motion picture camera came to be at almost the same time, and given that both cars and movies have gone on to hold such special places in American culture,...