Essays

A career-altering artistic breakthrough for director Martin Ritt, this dark tale of a family’s downfall daringly exposes the mythology of the western hero as empty and morally bankrupt.

Made in close collaboration with its star, Ellen Burstyn, Martin Scorsese’s first film for a major studio is a warm, openhearted portrait of a woman who endeavors a drastic reshaping of her life.

Though it became the subject of cultural hysteria upon its release in 1992, Neil Jordan’s film can be appreciated today as a rare and remarkably nuanced depiction of a cisgender man and a trans woman falling in love.

Neil Jordan achieved major international success with this complex exploration of identity and desire set against the turbulence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Shot clandestinely in Iran in just twenty-five days, Jafar Panahi’s acclaimed eleventh feature is a philosophical examination of political ethics that transforms into a comedy of manners and a psychological thriller.

One of the most outrageous films of John Waters’ early career, this brilliant portrait of queer rebellion envisions a world where the outcasts set aside their differences and band together against their fascist enemies.

Trash icon John Waters snuck into the commercial mainstream with this delightful coming-of-age comedy, which draws on the director’s love of classic Hollywood and features charismatic performances by Ricki Lake and Divine.

The first lesbian film of the New Queer Cinema to cross over in a big way to mainstream audiences, Lisa Cholodenko’s debut feature is a vivid portrait of a heroin-addled New York City subculture of artists, strivers, and hangers-on.

Unfolding in a blaze of vivacious color, Med Hondo’s musical masterpiece is a wildly ambitious exploration of the history of French colonial aggression, the enslavement of African peoples, and their subsequent liberation struggles.

In this powerful drama about family and memory, Joachim Trier explores how the past lives on in us, shapes us, and partly determines who we are and how we feel.

Featuring a quasi-documentary format that was innovative for its time, Bob Fosse’s complex portrait of stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce is a gesture of postmortem outreach from one prickly, jagged-edged artist to another.

New-media pioneer Shu Lea Cheang’s astonishingly prescient dystopian vision takes place in a world where technology feels sticky and bodily, and where networks seep into food, water, and flesh.

In his stylish and provocative directorial debut, Lawrence Kasdan uses the vehicle of a sex-and-murder plot to explore the film’s historical moment, which gave rise to the greed and amorality of the Reagan era.

In the landscape of gay-themed cinema, which often focuses on positivity and pride, Ira Sachs’s debut feature stands out for asking unsettling questions about the limits of queer connection across socioeconomic and racial divides.

In the trio of star-studded films that cemented his legacy as a groundbreaking figure in American cinema, the writer-director illuminated the hopes and struggles of Black communities in his native Los Angeles.

At a turning point in her career, one of Japanese cinema’s most beloved stars decided to step behind the camera, creating a string of remarkable films that possess the same honesty and warmth that distinguished her work as an actor.

A crime-cinema masterpiece whose influence can be seen in such later touchstones as Mean Streets and Reservoir Dogs, this highly stylized portrait of a gangster subordinates the needs of plot to director John Boorman’s saturated aesthetic.

One of Ernst Lubitsch’s favorites among his own films, this delightful pre-Code whodunit exemplifies the director’s signature European worldliness and his ingenious way of drawing viewers in as if they were coconspirators.

The legendary comedy troupe’s most fully realized film is a hilarious Biblical parody with a streak of overwhelming horror and outrage running through it.

Violently nihilistic, simultaneously energizing and crushing, Tsui Hark’s remake of the martial-arts classic One-Armed Swordsman captures the zeitgeist of pre–1997 handover Hong Kong.

Claude Lelouch’s Palme d’Or–winning breakout hit combines elements of a classic Hollywood love story with dynamic photography, an edgy editing style, and a naturalistic sense of character and location.

Martin Scorsese’s powerful drama, which recounts a series of killings that devastated the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma, turns the historical epic into a Möbius strip that blurs audience, film, and director.

In this true-crime epic, Martin Scorsese combines his career-long exploration of amoral gangsterism with a sobering meditation on what it means to live on American soil.

In her first and only theatrical feature, director Lynne Littman presents an unbearably intimate vision of apocalypse, focusing on the effects of a nuclear blast on one suburban American family.