Essays

Bong Joon Ho combines gritty crime drama with absurdist comedy in his breakthrough second feature, a dark tale set during a tumultuous period in South Korean history.

The feeling of freedom in this swooningly beautiful blend of melodrama and romantic comedy speaks to director Frank Borzage’s belief in the invincibility of love.

In this comic vision of the great beyond, Albert Brooks finds the sweet spot between the acerbic satire of his early films and the humanism of his later work.

Mike Leigh’s midcareer masterpiece is one of the finest examples of his ability to construct riveting drama from ordinary life.

By marrying the glamour of golden-age Hollywood to a quicksilver formal daring influenced by a wide range of artists, the Hong Kong auteur became one of the coolest and most beloved filmmakers in the world in the 1990s.

Drawing on influences ranging from classic Hollywood to cartoons, Jacques Rivette’s uncategorizable masterpiece plunges viewers into a world shaped by the friendship and imagination shared by two soul sisters.

One of the most striking debuts in film history, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s unconventional picaresque forged new aesthetic paths for African cinema with its dreamlike narrative, discontinuous editing, and jagged soundscapes.

With novelistic intimacy, Rahmin Bahrani’s follow-up to Man Push Cart illuminates the economic desperation hiding in plain sight in contemporary America.

Set in a transient, post-9/11 New York City, Rahmin Bahrani’s feature debut follows the Sisyphean toil of a Pakistani immigrant whose life teeters on the verge of catastrophe.

A film that now plays like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, Joyce Chopra’s first fiction feature shows how the myths that direct how girls come of age threaten their safe passage to womanhood.

Ousmane Sembène’s second feature departs from his early-career critiques of colonial power, instead focusing on the oppressive forces manifested within postcolonial African society.

Alan J. Pakula captured the anxiety of the seventies in this noir-inflected conspiracy thriller, which offers a critique both of American institutions and of the self-made heroes who do battle with them.

Set against a forbidding backdrop of war, this masterpiece of Soviet cinema contemplates the sources of evil while also searching for signs of meaning and divinity in a fallen world.

Combining elements of truth and artifice, Martin Scorsese’s documentary of Bob Dylan’s 1975–76 tour captures the legendary singer-songwriter brimming with confidence and at the peak of his gifts.

Bing Liu’s extraordinary debut feature was originally conceived as a documentary about skaters around the country and ultimately became an unflinching exploration of family, trauma, and the filmmaker’s own life.

Luis Buñuel weaved together multiple strands of his artistry in his final film, which blends the surrealism of his early years, the melodrama of his 1950s work, and the elegant erotic comedy of his late career.

Luis Buñuel lays bare the amorality and illogic of human affairs in the slew of straight-faced absurdities that make up his penultimate film.

Crazy things keep happening in Luis Buñuel’s perverse comedy of manners, a film that coolly deconstructs itself at every turn.

Capturing the tense mood of a new millennium, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s debut feature explores the hidden spaces of Mexico City at a moment of political turbulence and extreme social stratification.

With its thought-provoking structure, interweaving story lines, and saturated colors, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s debut feature represented a quantum leap in the audiovisual grammar of Mexican cinema.

In one of the most controversial films of his career, David Cronenberg adapts a scandalous J. G. Ballard novel, radically overhauling its story to address a society paralyzed in the headlights of a new millennium.

Sprawling across more than half a century of American history, Martin Scorsese’s crime saga combines epic ambition with a mood of isolation and dissolution.

With roots in Italian neorealism, Federico Fellini’s beguiling body of work moved beyond that movement to embrace the coalescing of real life and dream life.

In this highly quotable, opera-infused romantic comedy, Norman Jewison finds endless possibilities in a world dominated by constricting binaries.