Visual Analysis

When the Kajillionaire director saw sex, lies, and videotape as a teenager, she was transfixed by its exploration of desire mediated by technology, a theme that would later emerge in her own boundary-pushing work.

In this video essay, the director of Columbus examines how Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma combines intimate observations of everyday life with the grand sweep of history.

The director of Frankie and Keep the Lights On opens up about how the emotional and sexual candor of Chantal Akerman’s feature debut has inspired his own deeply personal approach to cinema.

In one of his most ambitious sequences, the silent-comedy legend throws his innocent “glasses” character into a death trap of a setting.

The Oscar-nominated director of Hale County This Morning, This Evening finds an expansive political vision in the mind-altering work of Godfrey Reggio.

The Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker unpacks the wild inventiveness of Orson Welles and the late-career masterpiece that inspired his own approach to his new movie They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.

The great German director reflects on her first experience with Ingmar Bergman’s classic meditation on mortality, a film that opened her eyes to the possibilities of cinema.

The Oscar-winning director of La La Land explains how an early encounter with À nos amours taught him to mix spontaneity and surprise into his own highly stylized worlds.

One of cinema’s most charismatic canines shows off his comedic chops in Leo McCarey’s screwball masterpiece The Awful Truth.

The acclaimed Norwegian filmmaker talks about Nicolas Roeg’s richly suggestive, nonlinear approach to time in his masterpiece Don't Look Now.

The award-winning director of The Rider explores the deep respect for nature and subjective human experience in Terrence Malick’s masterful vision of early seventeenth-century America.

The designers behind the celebrated fashion brand Rodarte talk about one of Robert Altman’s strangest films.

In 1921’s The Kid, Charlie Chaplin gave his lonely Tramp a five-year-old sidekick in Jackie Coogan, turning the boy into Hollywood’s first major child star.

In the image of the Little Tramp choking, Chaplin found the perfect motif for evoking the horrors of hunger and modern consumption.

In some of his most elaborately choreographed set pieces, the silent-comedy master confronted the chaos of the world with balletic grace and rhythmic precision.

The creator of The Wire takes inspiration from the narrative and moral complexity of Stanley Kubrick’s war masterpiece.

The director of the newly released Columbus takes a close look at how doors open onto philosophical mysteries in the films of French master Robert Bresson.

The director behind one of the most acclaimed films of the year, A Ghost Story, explains how David Gordon Green’s poetic vision of adolescence opened his eyes to the possibilities of cinema.

The veteran documentary filmmaker behind Hoop Dreams and the recently released Abacus: Small Enough to Jail discusses the ways in which Robert Altman’s masterpiece combines epic scope with intimate detail.

David Cairns takes a close look at the carefully calibrated minimalism of Hal Ashby’s masterful satire.

The director of The Love Witch talks about French master Jacques Demy, whose mix of candy-colored imagery and psychological darkness has made a lasting impact on her filmmaking approach.

In the first installment of our new video series Under the Influence, the Moonlight director waxes rhapsodic about Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love.