Essays

In this tale of four privileged bachelors who embark on a trip to the Indian countryside, Satyajit Ray balances a biting critique of masculine fragility with splendid visual grace.

With their mix of comedy, ecstasy, and aesthetic strangeness, the French auteur’s first three features grant us access to psychic states that we might not otherwise be able to enter.

Kleber Mendonça Filho explores the elisions of history and memory in this splendidly polymorphous thriller about a man on the run in 1977 Brazil.

In this exhilarating account of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Richard Linklater lovingly reconstructs the vanished world of late-fifties Paris and the cinephilic culture surrounding the French New Wave.

James Gray’s extraordinary debut feature is a painstakingly distilled tale of crime and family dysfunction, captured with a merciless gaze and a sharp attention to idiosyncratic detail.

In her second film, Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple captures the anguish and perils of disunity in the labor movement and the corrosion of union power during the Reagan era.

The pioneering husband-and-wife duo transformed the field of Japanese nonfiction cinema with their portraits of spectacular, edgy personalities and collectives under duress.

Set in 1930s French West Africa, Bertrand Tavernier’s hard-to-classify adaptation of the Jim Thompson novel Pop. 1280 offers an apocalyptic vision of a society in which institutions have abdicated their moral authority.

In his fiction features Beginners, 20th Century Women, and C’mon C’mon, the acclaimed director casts a sensitive gaze on the rich psychodynamics of human relationships and the hidden interconnections of our unconscious motivations.

In his second feature film, Nagisa Oshima explores the alienation of young Japanese people and their doomed attempts to assert themselves in a corrupt and increasingly conservative society.

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.