Phillip Lopate

Cinematic and carnal ravishment are sometimes at cross-purposes, as this celebrated American essayist discovered after many fumbled attempts at merging the two.

The director of Toni Erdmann burst onto the international festival circuit in 2003 with a piercing, unsettlingly funny look at the life of an idealistic schoolteacher.

Lino Brocka brought an invigoratingly personal and socially conscious vision to Philippine cinema with this gritty portrait of Manila barrio life.

In Speedy, Harold Lloyd, a comic genius who thought of himself as a quintessentially average American man, places his optimistic everyman character within the context of a society in shift, to great comedic effect.

A leading light of commedia all’italiana, Dino Risi specialized in fleet, satirical takes on contemporary Italian culture, and this road-trip smash was his most trenchant.

Rome is as exquisite as it is suffocating in Paolo Sorrentino’s profound tale of contemporary entropy.

A frenetic portrait of New York as well as a love story, Paul Fejos’s film captures the odd sensation of being alone in the big city, even when in a crowd.

La collectionneuse is a strong, sensuously lush, deceptively slight film, a riviera fruit with a bitter, uncompromising aftertaste.

With uncharacteristic warmth and affection for human frailty, Ingmar Bergman raises the question of how love can possibly last forever.

Alain Resnais’s antidocumentary never purports to “document” the heinous realities of the Holocaust; instead, it interrogates our responses.

Carl Dreyer’s modern tragedy eschews melodrama, striking a balance between suffering and triviality.