Kent Jones

The imitation of nature becomes a devotional act in Terrence Malick’s cinema, which reaches sublime heights in this exploration of childhood, memory, and grief.

Suffused with a quiet radiance, this Kazakh New Wave masterpiece grapples with cultural displacement through an allegorical tale of vengeance.

In his deeply personal third feature, Noah Baumbach charts a family’s dissolution against the backdrop of 1980s literary Brooklyn.

Les Blank’s long-lost documentary revels in the trippy, eccentric world of and surrounding Tulsa Sound pioneer Leon Russell, transforming what might have been a standard concert movie into a genuine work of art.

Inside Llewyn Davis takes its protagonist on a Hero’s Journey of characteristically Coen-esque proportions—a voyage at turns serious and comic, and framed by an exquisitely curated selection of folk melodies.

Peter Yates's crime drama is a haunting, singular experience, brutal and minutely observed, with a remarkably authentic sense of place.

The critic and WCP executive director offers a personal take on art cinema and a primer on the project’s scope and mission.

How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.

Delmer Daves’s classic western is psychologically probing, magnificently shot, and fascinatingly ambiguous.

Delmer Daves’s visually majestic, emotionally charged western finds its drama in the decency of its characters.

The camera never stops moving in the Dardenne brothers’ portrait of a troubled teenage girl desperate for a job.

The Dardennes threw down the gauntlet for a new type of unadorned dramatic storytelling with their breakthrough tale of a working-class boy’s fraught coming-of-age.

The film is made up of a succession of small visions, observed and executed with apparent ease but thought through with such exquisite care and attention that the experience becomes overwhelming.

In Edward Yang’s cinema in general, and in Yi Yi in particular, character and environment are inseparable.

“It is the most erotic film that I have ever made,” wrote Michael Powell of Black Narcissus. “It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image, from the beginning to the end.”

In this beautiful portrait of a French family, Olivier Assayas is stoically removed yet lovingly attentive to his characters’ vanities, idiosyn­crasies, and reserves of goodwill.

Every second of David Fincher’s uncanny drama—every shot and every cut, every gesture and every facial expression, every turn in its narrative and every visual effect—is devoted to the contemplation of time’s passing.