Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. D.W. Griffith has been reduced by his critics to a “yes, but …” sentence. Was the native Kentuckian a ...

Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: In the spirit of Life Of Riley, the final film by Alain Resnais, we’ve singled out other ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. After the deeply divisive reception of "The Birth of a Nation," director D.W. Griffith released "Broken Blossoms," in which a ...

In a newly resurfaced video essay, Kevin B. Lee contests that, incredible as “Inception” was, the technical foundation of the film was laid over a century ago by none other than D.W. Griffith. Lee ...

D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation is inarguably one of the landmarks of American cinema. The distillation of the storytelling techniques, editing ideas, framing and visual composition, and nuanced ...

This year marks the centennial of D. W. Griffith’s masterpiece, “The Birth of a Nation.” Who cares? Or who should? After all, it’s really only an embarrassing antique. Film historians have long ...

Is it possible to get past the controversy of Griffith's The Birth of a Nation to see his pioneering contributions to the language of movies? On DVD, the answer may be yes. (Credit: Bison Archives.) ...