[David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder.]

I have just had a sensational night at the movies, and the picture was only 83 years old. At the Silent Film Festival in San Francisco, the Castro Theater was packed for a showing of a “complete” Metropolis. Moreover, the screening was graced by the presence of the two Argentineans—scholar Fernando Pena and archivist Paula Felix-Didier—who discovered the previously lost footage in Buenos Aires a couple of years ago. I honor their work, and their amusing commentary on the discovery—they were a couple once, then separated, then back together with the excitement of the find. Still, “complete” needs quotation marks.

To make a long story comprehensible: when Metropolis opened in Germany in 1927, it was 150 or so minutes. Very soon thereafter, and despite the impact of the picture, the German distributor, Ufa,...

The Galileo case is often seen starkly as science’s first decisive blow against not only faith but also the power of the Roman Catholic Church. It has never been quite that simple, though. Galileo was a believer, devastated at being convicted, in 1633, of heresy for upending the biblical view of the universe.

Now a particularly enduring Catholic practice is on prominent display in, of all places, Florence’s history of science museum, recently renovated and renamed to honor Galileo: Modern-day supporters of the famous heretic are exhibiting newly recovered bits of his body — three fingers and a gnarly molar sliced from his corpse nearly a century after he died — as if they were the relics of an actual saint.

“He’s a secular saint, and relics are an important symbol of his fight for freedom of thought,” said Paolo Galluzzi, the director of the Galileo Museum, which put the tooth, thumb and index finger on view last month, uniting them with another of the...

The crew at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce may have eluded their London-based bosses by starting their own agency as Season 3 of Mad Men ended, but they couldn’t escape the British pop-culture invasion. Or other political, social and artistic changes hovering like clouds over their world.

As Season 4 cranks up Sunday, it’s Thanksgiving 1964. President Lyndon Johnson, elected by a landslide, has ordered the first bombings in North Vietnam. The slaying of three civil-rights activists in Mississippi lingers in the news. There’s talk of a “generation gap.”

Still — while the lives of the show’s characters may be in turmoil — the outlook isn’t totally bleak yet, suggests Rice University history professor Allen Matusow, author of The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (University of Georgia Press). A lot brews under the surface, he says, but cultural revolution hasn’t arrived. (The first anti-war protests and race riots occurred in 1965.)
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[Natasha Simons is assistant to the editor of National Review.]

Mad Men is a show about an unbending generation on the cusp of dissolution; Matthew Weiner, the show’s head writer, has often said that the majority of America in the early ’60s was still, by and large, living in the domestic ’50s. Weiner, a Baby Boomer, has a conflicted relationship with this time period. Because it is thegeneration of his parents, he wants to explore it and pore over it; because it’s the generation that, through Weiner’s specific political prism, reflects a hypocritical façade, he’d like it to form a gangway for the liberation to come. This ambivalence creates a divide in the audience’s responses to the show, which tend to fall along political lines.

Conservatives and liberals just can’t help but see Mad Men differently: the former with apprehension, the latter with anticipation. The show inspires a certain self-satisfaction in the type of viewers who would observe each instance...

It is almost 50 years since the Beach Boys sang about surfing and California girls, and began to take a once outlawed sport into mainstream culture. With surfing now a global industry and a hobby for millions, an ambitious plan has been launched to document the first days of the sport.

The Surfing Heritage Foundation, based in the southern Californian town of San Clemente, is seeking to collect the oral history of the sport by talking to its oldest living practitioners. It wants to find people who remember a time when waves were still uncrowded and surfing was seen as the preserve of a few crazy, dangerous wild men and women.

It will look at the sport before it became popular in the 1950s and 1960s, when it inspired California's beach culture of girls in bikinis and the music scene that went with it.

The foundation is interviewing surfers in their 70s, 80s and 90s to preserve the story of the sport's beginnings and its early culture. It is also...

What’s left of Saddam Hussein’s showcase collection of 20th-century Iraqi art is crammed into three dingy galleries of a formerly grand museum on Haifa Street here. The rest of the building once known as the Center for Contemporary Art has become a warren of offices and cubicles fortified by bricks, barbed wire and sandbags and closed to the public.

Hundreds of works are packed away in a hot, dusty storeroom, tended to by a doting but frustrated staff. Many of the paintings there are damaged. All are withering from dangerous conditions and haphazard storage, from the heat and Iraq’s official indifference to an important if lesser-known part of its artistic heritage.

Such is the state of Iraq’s modern art collection, renamed the National Museum of Modern Art in 2006 yet still an institution that exists mostly as an idea. That it exists at all is owed largely to the efforts of a group of officials, curators and artists who have struggled through years of war to...

A graphic novel based on the diaries of Anne Frank was released Friday in the Netherlands.

The Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam said it is hoping the format will encourage more youngsters to discover Anne Frank's story.

An English-language version of the graphic novel will be available in North America in September.

Frank is the young Jewish girl whose family spent two years in hiding in Amsterdam as the Nazis occupied the Netherlands. Just 13 when she and her family began living in a secret annex in a factory building, Anne kept a diary of her experience.

The more things change – from the landscape to the language — the more there is to talk about.

Bronx News Network flags a screening of rarely seen, mostly ’70s- and ’80s-era documentaries about the Bronx as part of the Anthology Film Archives’ series “The Outer Boroughs on Film.”

For example, “Lincoln Hospital” (1970) looks at how one Bronx community joined together to rescue local mental health services after the failure of a city plan for their improvement. A trailer for the film on YouTube speaks to the notion that these are “unseen” — only 23 views so far!...

Snapped in 1984 at the Nasir Bagh Afghani refugee camp in Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan War, the famous “Afghan Girl” photograph shot its subject and creator to international fame when it graced the cover of National Geographic magazine in 1985. The young Pashtun orphan lifted to iconic status remained anonymous until 2002, however, when the Magnum photographer Steve McCurry located her. And now, for the first time in the UK, McCurry’s “Afghan Girl”, together with the story of his meeting with Sharbat Gula, is included among approximately 80 stills in the photojournalist’s retrospective at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s Waterhall.

The collection represents the American’s work in South Asia and, to a lesser degree, South America over the twenty-five-plus years that followed his breakthrough and is the sole venue for this exclusive showing. The 2002 National Geographic film narrated by Sigourney Weaver, Search for the Afghan Girl, is on continuous play at the back...