Features

A seductive brew of decadence, dada, and drag, the German director’s fantastical films embrace the possibilities of female visual pleasure.

Entwined with the evolution of American culture, boxing movies have used the microcosm of the ring to tackle issues of race, class, gender, and labor.

In her last significant film role, the art-house icon reveals an emotional vulnerability previously hidden by her ethereal persona.

Both crowd-pleasing and gleefully subversive, Blake Edwards’s 1982 hit Victor/Victoria remains one of the few Hollywood musicals that explicitly depicts queer life.

The long, quietly tense opening minutes of L’eclisse offer a blueprint for filmmakers looking to craft a devastating breakup scene.

The Indian director, actor, and producer’s early death has enshrined him as a tragic icon in public memory. But there is more to his art than misery.

A major figure in contemporary Hindi literature pays tribute to Guru Dutt in this fantasia that reimagines the great filmmaker’s death.

With his love of dissonance and bold use of dramatic motifs, the Hungarian-born composer Miklós Rózsa popularized a whole new style of film music.

In his collaborations with Ford, the beloved star—the highest-paid Hollywood actor of the early 1930s—played multidimensional characters that challenged assumptions about Native Americans.

The director of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair reflects on the transformative power of a Sonic Youth needle drop in Olivier Assayas’s 1996 film.

Louis Feuillade’s influential serial Les Vampires reflected the French national subconscious at the time by depicting a madcap world of anarchy and violent spectacle.

In his uncompromising chronicles of modern Japanese society, the celebrated filmmaker shows a deep understanding of both larger-than-life individuals and collectives of ordinary citizens.

A landmark of leftist documentary filmmaking, Leo Hurwitz’s Strange Victory examines the hypocrisy of a nation that defeated fascism abroad while maintaining an apartheid society at home.

In his speech at this year’s New York Film Critics Circle Awards ceremony, where Drive My Car received Best Film, the Oscar-winning director talks about cinema’s power to influence real life.

The production designer of Pariah explains how Federico Fellini imbues the mysterious, bare-bones structure in the film’s final scene with profound metaphorical significance.

A playfully philosophical drama, My American Uncle has been largely forgotten, yet it is the most down-to-earth of the French master’s exhilarating engagements with modernist aesthetics.

With its rambling Victorian mansions and seedy charms, the once-exclusive area of downtown Los Angeles was film noir’s favorite neighborhood.

The differences between William Wyler’s two film versions of the play The Children’s Hour reveal the challenges of representing same-sex desire in Hollywood cinema.

Working with meager budgets and few resources, Michael Sporn created a graceful, pared-down aesthetic that was distinctive in the realm of children’s entertainment.

At the nineteenth edition of the Morelia International Film Festival, a repertory sidebar showcased the stylistically audacious work of a leading figure of Mexico’s cine de oro.

Over a career that has spanned over five decades, the influential artist has sustained an incisive critique of Black representation in mass media and opened up new possibilities in every medium he has touched.

In the 1961 screen adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s classic play, the actor radiantly embodies the conflicting impulses that define the character of Beneatha Younger—a modern woman filled with hope and longing.

A ’20s jazz hit provides a rare moment of peace in Howard Hawks’s frenzied screwball comedy.

Five trailblazing directors of photography featured in the Criterion Channel series Female Gaze reflect on their craft and the challenges of pushing the envelope in a changing industry.