Lucy Sante

Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough feature—a rare example of a work of personal cinema with broad popular appeal—delivers all the elements of his future career in one spectacular, bravura throw-down.

Louis Feuillade’s influential serial Les Vampires reflected the French national subconscious at the time by depicting a madcap world of anarchy and violent spectacle.

With The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles created a model of period filmmaking, lightly deploying historical signifiers while focusing on the haunting power of his actors’ faces.

G. W. Pabst’s breathlessly paced reimagining of a mine disaster makes an urgent plea for international cooperation in the post–World War I era.

In his first sound film, silent-era master G. W. Pabst captures both the familial camaraderie and everyday brutality of life in the trenches.

Paris Belongs to Us marked the genesis of Jacques Rivette’s unique filmmaking style—introducing visual and narrative elements that Rivette would build on over the course of his long career.

Burroughs: The Movie, the culmination of late director Howard Brookner’s NYU thesis project, follows William S. Burroughs over the course of five years and provides “an authorial profile such as has never been and may never be matched.”

Aki Kaurismäki pays wry tribute to the starving artist in his sad and funny update of Henri Murger’s classic book.

Charlie Chaplin’s transcendent, visionary comedy is made up of one iconic moment after another.

In 1945 Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, a canny and gifted tabloid newspaper photographer, did something unprecedented: he assembled some of his best shots, of corpses and fires and arrests and crowds and spectacles, and made them into a book, publis

In this quintessential noir, Samuel Fuller breaks with the Red Scare formula of his contemporaries by contrasting the faceless evil of Communism against the peccadilloes of the workaday American crook.

Quai des Orfèvres is nominally a policier—a crime story, less a mystery than a police procedural; its title, referring to the Parisian equivalent of Scotland Yard, announces it. But title and genre are misleading, they are foliage. As a crime pict