Essays

Unencumbered by the white gaze, Reginald Hudlin’s groundbreaking feature-film debut is a celebration of a Black community in all its diversity, featuring fully realized characters who exist not as spectacle but as reality.

A deft mixture of family epic, romantic melodrama, landscape cinema, and comedy, Burkinabe director Idrissa Ouédraogo’s landmark film balances the universality of its themes with the fierce individuality of its characters.

At once earnest and fantastic, carefree and mindful, G. Aravindan’s richly imagined work of folklore channels the director’s deep spiritual vision through the form of a children’s story.

This visually stunning masterpiece from Kazakh New Wave iconoclast Ardak Amirkulov is one of the few films that looks evil in the eye without flinching.

A singular achievement in Arab film history, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s sweeping political epic is a memorial to the lives lost in the struggle for Algerian independence.

The constant negotiation of routine pleasure and profound sorrow—the experience of being human—is at the heart of John Huston’s final film, an exquisite adaptation of James Joyce’s classic short story.

A smash hit at the box office, this electrifying adventure film established the team of director Michael Curtiz and actors Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland as one of the most iconic creative partnerships in Hollywood.

Amid the disorientation of the COVID-19 era, this rousing film cut through with a life-affirming reminder that community and connection are still possible.

Spike Lee captures the democratic spirit and the galvanizing, near-spiritual feeling of togetherness at the heart of David Byrne’s acclaimed stage production.

Paul Reubens’s iconic character comes to cinematic life in this collaboration with director Tim Burton, who creates an on-screen world that evokes the unbridled joy and overwhelming terror of childhood.

In one of cinema’s greatest love stories, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger use the mercurial beauty of Scotland’s Inner Hebrides to evoke the unruly passions of an indelible heroine.

In her Cannes-award-winning narrative feature debut, Mira Nair sees the lives of Indian street children with an unconditionally generous gaze, taking in their world in all its contradictions and complexity.

In a string of short films he made in the 1920s, Man Ray brought a restlessly inventive spirit to a young medium, pushing the boundaries of cinematic form with frenetic editing, abstract imagery, and surrealist camera tricks.

Inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle, Stanley Kubrick’s final film is a deeply personal examination of the fragility of marriage and the destructive power of sexual fantasy.

Though the first two decades of the Iranian filmmaker’s career have long been underappreciated, this fertile period yielded philosophical and restlessly innovative works that reinvigorated both documentary and narrative-fiction cinema.

A pre-Code aviation epic that makes pioneering use of the era’s innovations in cinematic color and sound, Howard Hughes’s directorial debut was Hollywood’s first modern portrait of World War I.

This tale of paranoia and romantic jealousy slyly combines the conventions of popular Mexican filmmaking with the surrealist sensibility that made its director, Luis Buñuel, a legendary figure in his native Spain.

The first of Arturo Ripstein’s films to receive wider international acclaim, this blood-soaked, surrealist vision of amour fou harks back to the director’s roots as an admirer and protégé of Luis Buñuel.

An adaptation of a classic pulp novel by William Lindsay Gresham, Guillermo del Toro’s first foray into film noir is an intensely evocative exploration of how human impulses can give rise to monsters.

It is hard to conceive of a film more dazzlingly, dizzyingly divided against itself—or one more appropriately so—than this delirious creation of screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky and director Ken Russell.

Set in a postcard-perfect American town, David Cronenberg’s provocative take on the old-fashioned crime thriller examines the pleasure we derive from cinematic violence and the construction of patriarchal impunity.

In Wes Anderson’s romantic ode to journalism, the director grapples with the danger and horror inherent in any field of endeavor worth pursuing.

In his second stop-motion feature, Wes Anderson grapples with what it means to acknowledge one another within systems that separate beings between pet and master, wild and tamed.

Made with a formal control unparalleled in modern American cinema, the films of this utterly distinctive auteur seek to contain and understand an uncontainable, unknowable world.