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The American Civil War was the most consequential conflict in United States history and has been powerfully depicted on screen countless times. From epic accounts of fierce battles to personal explorations of soldiers experiences, as a medium, film has the power to represent the full spectrum of this harrowing conflict, where brothers fought against brothers and communities turned on one another. This can often lead to emotional movie-viewing experiences, as, more so than any other art form, films allow audiences to witness the shocking, bloody, and uncomfortably graphic sides of warfare.

Like the best war movie, depictions of the Civil War highlight not just the challenges of society during that conflict but also today's social and political tensions. This can be seen through the racial representation in a movie like Glory or even as a thought experiment in the imagined dystopian conflict seen in Alex Garlands Civil War, which showcased...

The three films included on the Criterion Collection’s Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers collectively suggest a miniature narrative of Browning’s evolution as a filmmaker. Though this two-disc set offers but a dip of the toe into Browning’s work, it’s governed by a persuasive through line. Here we get a film, 1925’s The Mystic, that’s rich in promise and less personal than the other two, one a perverse masterwork, 1927’s The Unknown, that’s criminally underseen by contemporary audiences, and the other a cult classic, 1932’s Freaks, that’s too often discussed in terms of its notoriety. Watching these films together offers a sketch of an artist’s sensibility reaching fruition, as a fine-grained empathy rises to the fore.

Browning’s affinity for outcasts has been well-documented and is discussed at length in the supplements included with this set, particularly in a new interview with author...

D.W. Griffith’s 1915 black-and-white classic “The Birth of a Nation” has been colorized. Named one of the hundred best films of all time, this new updated edition, “The Birth Of A Nation: The Colorized Version,” is available in DVD format from Createspace.com, a subsidiary of the Amazon group of companies and features new colorized intertitle cards.

The film follows the lives of the northern Stoneman and southern Cameron families before, during and after the Civil War. When Confederate colonel Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall) is captured in battle, nurse Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish) petitions for his pardon. Cameron then founds the Ku Klux Klan, which makes him battle Elsie’s congressman father (Ralph Lewis) and his African-American protégé, Silas Lynch (George Siegmann).

Read More: ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Premieres in Toronto, and Audiences Give Nate Parker a Second Chance

“The Birth Of A Nation” was a commercial success upon release,...

Ramon Novarro and Greta Garbo in ‘Mata Hari’: The wrath of the censors (See previous post: "Ramon Novarro in One of the Best Silent Movies.") George Fitzmaurice’s romantic spy melodrama Mata Hari (1931) was well received by critics and enthusiastically embraced by moviegoers. The Greta Garbo / Ramon Novarro combo — the first time Novarro took second billing since becoming a star — turned Mata Hari into a major worldwide blockbuster, with $2.22 million in worldwide rentals. The film became Garbo’s biggest international success to date, and Novarro’s highest-grossing picture after Ben-Hur. (Photo: Ramon Novarro and Greta Garbo in Mata Hari.) Among MGM’s 1932 releases — Mata Hari opened on December 31, 1931 — only W.S. Van Dyke’s Tarzan, the Ape Man, featuring Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan, and Edmund Goulding’s all-star Best Picture Academy Award winner Grand Hotel (also with Garbo, in addition to Joan Crawford, John Barrymore, Wallace Beery, and...

Along with the lineage that can be traced from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) back to Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928) is the latter’s indelible imprint upon Brian DePalma’s 2006 neo-noir The Black Dahlia, based on James Ellroy’s novel, where mutilation reclaims its destructive thrust as an expressive mask of life’s inequitable if not inevitable horrors.

To synopsize briefly, in The Man Who Laughs—the filmic adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel—Gwynplaine (Conrad Veidt), the son of a noble father who has displeased King James II, is turned over to a surgeon, Dr. Hardquannone (George Siegman), associated with a band of ostracized and feared gypsies, the Comprachicos (literally “child-buyers"), for proper punishment: a facial mutilation which leaves him with a permanent and ghastly rictus grin. As a title card states, the King condemns him “to laugh forever at his fool of a father.