Essays

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.

Jacques Audiard’s Paris-set drama about small-time hoodlum with musical ambitions crystallized his identity as an artist with a high degree of confidence and control.

Propelled by outstanding performances from Emmanuelle Devos and Vincent Cassel, Jacques Audiard’s third feature is the rare French crime film built around a complex female character who takes initiative in a male-dominated world.

A tale of animal survival in a world deserted by humanity, Gints Zilbalodis’s Oscar-winning triumph casts a hushed spell with its elemental storytelling, immersive visual style, and creaturely subjectivity.

One of the most influential comedies of the 1980s, Rob Reiner’s rock-and-roll satire is a remarkably authentic, lived-in portrait of musicians, their egotism, and the industry that feeds off their stardom.

A portrait of a new generation of feminist consciousness in the New York art world, Lizzie Borden’s first film project spikes with a persistent friction between the filmmaker and her documentary subjects.

In response to the suffocating conservatism of the eighties, Lizzie Borden crafted a pluralistic vision of a feminist front that neither ignores difference nor lets it stand as an immovable obstacle to political solidarity.

Alice Wu’s feature debut is a romantic comedy in which the most compelling relationship is the one between a young queer Chinese American woman and her long-widowed mother.

Zeinabu irene Davis’s sole narrative feature is a vision of the past as it might have been, as well as an exploration of how history becomes a part of the everyday rhythms of Black life.

Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist masterpiece captures the indifference and hostility of the adult world through the eyes of two young boys who share a bond stronger than that of family.

In his fifth and sixth feature films, Edward Yang sought to uncover what was hidden in Taipei society, often in plain sight, looking past the city’s shiny skyline to the fault lines beneath the surface.

This remarkably sensitive yet jarringly violent romance epitomizes director Youssef Chahine’s late-fifties hybrid style, which combined elements of Hollywood entertainment with an unmistakably Egyptian spirit.

In his achingly beautiful debut feature, Kenneth Lonergan captures the dynamics of a sibling relationship shaped by grief, revealing its complexities with narrative economy and deep emotion.