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On June 7th of 2025, the AMERICAN CINEMATHEQUE hosted — as a part of their famous, now worldwide festival BLEAK WEEK (a screening series focused on deep, dark, and heavy, aka, feel-bad cinema) — a screening of Carl Dreyer’s 1943 masterpiece, DAY OF WRATH.

Filmed during the Nazi occupation of Denmark and set in the seventeenth century, it’s focused on the second wife of a pastor who falls in love with her stepson amid paranoia and witch hunts. If it sounds like a melodrama — trust me, it isn’t.

The screening, on a hot LA summer day at 1:00 PM, was sold out, and seats were filled with filmmakers such as Rian Johnson, Karina Longworth, my mentor and friend Larry Karaszewski, among many others.

Before the film started, Deborah Stoiber — collection manager in the Moving Image Department at the George Eastman Museum — introduced the rare nitrate print in a way that caught my attention and set me up for an unforgettable viewing experience.

So as part of my mission with SECRET MOVIE CLUB…

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

MATTHEW GENTILE: George Stevens Jr. is with me today. He has worn many hats as a producer, director, screenwriter, the founder of the American Film Institute, the creator of the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, and the co-creator of the Kennedy Center Honors. For his achievements in cinema and television, Mr. Stevens Jr. has won 14 Emmys, two Peabody Awards, eight Writers Guild of America Awards, as well as a Humanitas Prize, an honorary Oscar in 2012, which was presented to him by his collaborator, Sidney Poitier. In January of this past year, Mr. Stevens Jr. was honoredby President Joe Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest honor for a civilian. In 2022, he released his captivating memoir, My Place in the Sun, Life in the Golden Age of Hollywood and Washington, which tells the story of him and his father, George Stevens Sr., who directed copious classics such as A Place in the Sun, Giant, and Shane, among many, many others. Mr. Stevens Jr.’s revered documentary about his father, George Stevens, A Filmmaker’s Journey, has been newly restored this year and is now streaming on Max.

GEORGE STEVENS JUNIOR: Yes, well, I’m really happy to be here and looking forward to…

American independent cinema's parallel 20th century story is as rich and varied as that of its bigger budgeted Hollywood sibling.

Barbara Loden's 1970 WANDA about a restless working class woman's life and relationship with a small time agitated thief is one of American independent cinema's lodestones. 

Most courses or series trying to take someone through key indie American works would probably include the works of John Cassavettes, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Shirley Clarke, Jonas Mekas, and WANDA among others.

Before independent cinema itself got coopted into something different, these movies were truly made by moviemakers who couldn't or didn't want to be a part of the system.

Renegades, iconoclasts, contrarians. Real independents. Like Barbara Loden.

Loden, an actor known to many…

Italian 1960's landmark movie FISTS IN THE POCKET is one of those movies that's hard to figure out divorced from its time's context and deeper research into what made it such a lightning rod movie.

Watched as just a movie in 2025, it's unsettling and mysterious. What is Bellocchio trying to communicate in this unconventional story of an Italian family frustrated and unsatisfied?

The movie centers around possibly sociopathic Sandro, the middle brother of a mostly homebound Italian family, as he lusts after …

The beauty and frustration of cinema is that there will always be moviemakers, bodies of work, movies you haven't yet discovered or gotten to.

Many times, you'll get to them. And they are revelations. Other times, you never fill in the gaps. Life is so short. 

This writer had never heard of British political moviemaker Peter Watkins until a friend recommended his work. At least this is one moviemaker now discovered.

Watkins' five decade career began with fascinating fictional documentaries in the 1960's and extended into the 21st century with up to 14+ hour documentaries and features. 

Watkins' PUNISHMENT PARK, made in California and released in 1971, is a dystopian alternative reality fictional feature disguised as a documentary. A US government program…

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's documentary on 60's & 70's music pioneer Sylvester Stewart and his seminal band Sly & The Family Stone is both familiar and unique.

Familiar because we've seen this doc of a music star's rise and fall before. Unique because Thompson wants to drill down deeper. He wants the audience to understand the undiscussed stresses American black stars carry when they breakthrough to mainstream success.

Like Thompson's 2021 Academy Award winning doc SUMMER OF SOUL (also on Hulu) about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, SLY LIVES! meets us at the intersection of culture shaping music, the socio-economic furnace that birthed it, and…

Because we know the jaw dropping stunts of the Buster Keaton masterpieces-Sherlock Jr, The General, Seven Chances-a sweet hearted, ingenious, genial entry like Keaton's 1925 GO WEST almost feels like Keaton at half-speed.

But the deliberate construction, set piece development, and calculated escalation to a third act cattle drive through the streets of downtown Los Angeles (or a studio backlot) remind you otherwise.

You're in the hands of a master here. Don't worry. You'll get your money's worth. 

Keaton may be…

Sometimes a single movie can elucidate and illuminate a country's or region's national character better than a dozen history courses.

At the same time, the viewer must have the humility to realize they will never understand. Not really.

Elem Klimov's World War II horror phantasmagoria COME AND SEE stuns and shocks. It pummels and provokes. It speaks the truth in the blasphemous tongue of experience.

It follows naive if well meaning young Belarusian teen Flyora (a towering performance by Aleksei Kravchenko) as he leaves his mother and sisters to join the partisan resistance movement against the invading Nazis. 

He wants to be part of the war effort. He is. But mostly as a horrified witness to the depravity and unconscionable primal horror of man at war.

The movie is a kind of picaresque tale in hell. Florya …

Just when you thought the air might be going out of the balloon of cinema, a moviemaker like Japan's Junta Yamaguchi reminds you it's all about the idea.

Shot on smart phones, Sean Baker TANGERINE-style, BEYOND THE INFINITE TWO MINUTES is a sci-fi comedy about a single cafe owner who discovers the desktop computer in his apartment above his cafe has somehow become able to show the future via the desktop computer downstairs in his cafe. . .two minutes from now.

When his Friends realize what's going on, they extend the loop by having the computers face each other. The entire movie takes place in one location with the characters shuttling upstairs and downstairs and struggling with whether this is a great gift or a pair of handcuffs robbing them of any free will decision.

This is another of the great high concept-low budget sci-fi movies we've been seeing for the last 20 years or so. A genre that now includes amazing movies like …

The miracle of Mike Leigh movies is how he and his team of collaborators refuse to lean into the expected.

Every time you worry that a scene will go a certain way, the Leigh ensemble manages a way to unpredictability. They create a bridge of empathy and openness in this rigor and we, the audience, cross it.

ANOTHER YEAR follows a stable, happy older couple (Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent) across four seasons as they open their home to their son, family, and friends and the associated problems they bring in; Mary (an otherworldly brilliant Lesley Manville) is such a hot mess she soon becomes the …

Italian master Francesco Rosi, along with German master Rainer Werner Fassbinder, may be one of the most astute minds ever to tackle political cinema.

A former journalist, Rosi makes hard-nosed, unsentimental, brutal pictures (SALVATORE GIULIANO, HANDS OVER THE CITY, THE MATTEI AFFAIR) about how power and politics really work. His movies are textbooks for anyone who wants to tackle political subjects in their art.

ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES follows Inspector Rogas (a wonderfully grim and determined Lino Ventura, famous tough guy French movie star who actually was an Italian so this movie is a kind of homecoming) as he investigates the murders of noted Italian judges.

At first, Rogas comes to believe the murders are…

t's a piercing realization to see a neorealist Brazilian movie like the classic PIXOTE and realize that movies like IT, not movies like SALO or THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE, are the movies that are truly hard to watch.

Movies made, at least in part, to provoke, shock, scandalize because of their outre subject matter, are still often aestheticized enough to give us distance. A middle school edgelord can watch them and boast.

Movies like PIXOTE are existential confrontations with no answers. They shake us to our core. They break our feet of clay.

PIXOTE based on the novel "A Infância dos Mortos" by José Louzeiro follows our titular 10 year old from corrupt abusive reform school to the mean streets of Sao Paolo and Rio De Janeiro. Things only get worse. Pixote does his best to …