J. Hoberman

The Safdie brothers explore money, basketball, and racial tensions in this manic tale of a New York City jewelry dealer’s existential meltdown.

The first and most influential film adaptation of H. G. Wells’s sci-fi classic, this brilliantly imagined vision of apocalypse captured American anxieties at the height of the Cold War.

Jules Dassin’s atmospheric, genre-defining heist thriller combines American virtuosity with French cool.

From the scary thuds and mysterious roars that accompany the no-frills titles to the bizarrely poignant final image of the monster, alone at the bottom of the ocean, Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla is all business and pure dream.

At once prestigious literary adaptation and slap­stick buddy flick, this is something like a lowbrow art film, an egghead monster movie, a hilarious paean to reckless indulgence, and perhaps the most widely released midnight movie ever made.

Centered on the destruction wrought by unbridled female eros, Pandora’s Box would, in its shockingly modern, instinct-driven psychology, end up defining both its director and its star.

Another movie, another cause célèbre: this mysterious film by Orson Welles has been dismissed as a disaster and hailed as a masterpiece.

The first, fantastically inventive stage of Jean-Luc Godard’s career ended with the flaming apocalypse of Weekend (1967) and the events of May ’68, in which he participated both as a demonstrator and (anonymous) filmmaker. Over the next five year

The kind of aesthete who could fashion a religion out of the old National Enquirer, Shohei Imamura has a passion for everything that’s kinky, lowlife, or irrational in Japanese culture. He populates his films with murderers, hillbillies, shamans, a

The last, best, and funniest movie Milos Forman would make in his native Czechoslovakia, The Firemen’s Ball is a deceptively simple miniature. This 73-minute movie, its premise scarcely more than an anecdote, finds an entire universe in the benefit

A majestic synthesis of disparate forms, Sergei Eisenstein’s final film seems to be as much a ballet or an opera or a moving painting (or a mutant kabuki show) as it is a movie. As elaborately scored by the distinguished composer Sergei Prokofiev,

This epic reimagining of medieval Russia was the most historically audacious production made in the twenty-odd years after Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.