Essays

Unlike the string of early-1980s sex comedies that it superficially resembles, Paul Brickman’s debut feature fuses fierce social satire and dark, dreamy eroticism with unexpectedly rich and ambiguous results.

Chen Kaige’s sweeping epic chronicles the history of twentieth-century China through the story of two childhood friends, contrasting the unchanging traditions of their Beijing-opera milieu with the nation’s swift and turbulent transformation.

Glauber Rocha’s ambitious breakthrough film manifested the project of Cinema Novo, a new wave that sought to overcome the influence of Brazil’s colonial origins and find images and sounds that could reconceive the nation.

In one of the most patient films he has ever made, Wim Wenders captures how everyday existence drifts into our dream lives.

Self-destruction is not only an aesthetic but its own subject matter in Sam Peckinpah’s deeply elegiac western, a towering masterpiece that examines American power and greed.

Barry Jenkins’s extraordinarily ambitious limited series distinguishes itself in the tradition of the cinematic slavery epic through its understanding that Black joy and Black trauma cannot be cleaved from each other.

A masterpiece from the golden age of Mexican cinema, Emilio Fernández’s film is a prime example of the cabaretera film, an offshoot of the popular “prostitute melodrama” genre.

In this stylish erotic noir, Lilly and Lana Wachowski delight in destabilizing our genre and gender expectations, laying the foundation for the trans sensibility that runs through all their work.

A radically strange, postmodern adaptation of a novel by Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film is grounded by a sweaty, seething, meaty eroticism—a confrontational sexuality that remains bracing.

This Oscar-winning courtroom drama revolves around one of director Justine Triet’s most complex creations—a high-achieving female protagonist whose motivations remain tenaciously mysterious.

In Karyn Kusama’s award-winning feature debut, Michelle Rodriguez delivers a smoldering performance as a young woman who finds in boxing a container for her grief, loss, and rage.

The Senegalese filmmaker’s steadfast devotion to African autonomy led him to become a foundational contributor to the hard-won, dynamic flourishing of an independent cinematic tradition on his home continent.

Despite the harsh critical drubbing it received upon its release in 1960, Michael Powell’s lurid tale of obsession and violence is now widely regarded as a masterpiece—and as a key inspiration for an entire subgenre of “slasher” movies.

The gentle rapport between actors Lili Taylor and River Phoenix fuels this humane examination of American masculinity, a film that showcases the nuanced and compassionate approach of director Nancy Savoca.

With its delirious images and audaciously poetic style, Soviet filmmaker Mikhail Kalatozov’s hymn to revolution moves beyond ordinary logic to capture the mysterious beauty of collective utopia.

Unfolding in elaborately choreographed long takes, this sublime adaptation of László Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance captures the weight of time and the mood of fascism with a haunting palpability.

In her first fiction film, director Alice Diop brings the skills of observation she has learned from her documentary work to a thought-provoking exploration of race, power, and motherhood.

In Gus Van Sant’s wickedly funny tale of suburban depravity, Nicole Kidman plays a vacuous weather reporter whose hunger for fame anticipates our own era of digital celebrity.

One of the first postrevolutionary Iranian films screened and celebrated internationally, Amir Naderi’s autobiographical masterpiece is a lyrical exploration of childhood that showcases the director’s gift for radical simplicity.

In this profoundly emotional portrait of artist Nan Goldin, director Laura Poitras explores how her subject’s creative sensibility and commitment to activism spring from the same source.

Hollywood legend Raoul Walsh’s first movie for Warner Bros. is an epoch-spanning tall tale that takes inspiration from the New York City of his childhood and closes out a run of influential gangster films he inaugurated in the silent era.

Combining the influence of the wuxia genre, the Hong Kong New Wave filmmaking of the 1980s, and loony comic-book futurism, these two ass-kicking fantasias are dazzling showcases of female physicality.

Released at the height of the civil rights movement, this deceptively simple tale of a working-class Black man’s search for love and self-worth broke ground with its realism, nuance, and intensity.

Through its echoes, resonances, and intricately branching stories, this cycle of films evokes the feeling that life, like the weather, is based on patterns too complex to ever be fully predictable.