Essays

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Separated by more than a decade in Ingmar Bergman’s filmography, these two formally masterful dramas uncover the ugliness of male aggression and brutality.

Seen as a light-hearted farce upon its release, this star-studded comedy by Hal Ashby stands as one of Hollywood’s most prescient portraits of post-Watergate politics.

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Two early works by Ingmar Bergman show the Swedish master grappling with the conventions of melodrama, which would go on to influence his later explorations of spiritual torment.

In a world vulnerable to authoritarianism, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s television epic stands as an example of how an artist can speak to a broad audience about revolutionary politics.

This faithful screen adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s legendary play explores a wide range of perspectives on working-class black life, and over the years has inspired reactions just as diverse.

Once called “the great directorial genius of Hollywood” by Carole Lombard, Gregory La Cava struck comedy gold with this mix of madcap high jinks, irresistible romance, and social commentary.

The imitation of nature becomes a devotional act in Terrence Malick’s cinema, which reaches sublime heights in this exploration of childhood, memory, and grief.

Fueled by the rebellious sounds of rock and roll, Olivier Assayas’s long-unavailable breakthrough film is a remarkably unsentimental journey through the memories of youth.

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea brought cinema to the center of Cuban society with this richly ambiguous portrait of postrevolutionary Havana.

A haven for punks and drifters, 1980s downtown New York is captured in all its grit and romance in Susan Seidelman’s Palme d’Or–nominated debut feature.

Reimagining the story of a Mexican American folk hero, this revisionist western ushered in a new era in both Chicano and independent filmmaking.

A feast of sumptuous color and cinematic imagination, Powell and Pressburger’s postwar masterpiece is also a powerful reckoning with recent history.

Flesh has rarely been as alive on-screen as it is in Steven Soderbergh’s feature debut, an intimate drama that changed the face of American independent film.

In this essay originally published in the New Yorker, Roger Angell hails Ron Shelton’s comic ode to baseball as one of the few movies to capture the essence of the sport.

The martial-arts film was never the same after King Hu got his hands on it, reinventing the genre with subtle editing and dazzling choreography.

Josef von Sternberg may have been one of cinema’s original micromanagers, but his films are testaments to longstanding collaborations with brilliant artists and technicians.

John Waters’ favorite among his early works is both an assault on political correctness and a no-holds-barred expression of gay militancy.

During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.

At a time when Spain was trying to leave its past behind, master filmmaker Víctor Erice transported viewers back to the post–Civil War era, examining its traumas through the eyes of a child.

A galvanizing mix of polemic and entertainment, Michael Moore’s look at the American gun obsession is as chillingly relevant today as when it was released.

Marlene Dietrich’s sexually authoritative, coolly insolent persona was the product of meticulous screen craft.

Gritty realism meets Hollywood-inspired melodrama in this portrait of urban poverty, seen through the eyes of star-crossed lovers.

John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy is a milestone along several different paths of movie history, all of which converged at the majestically seedy crossroads of Times Square in the spring of 1968.

About halfway through Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation (2016), Dr. Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni) finds himself in a patch of woods in the middle of the night, crying. It’s a surprisingly vulnerable moment for a protagonist who is usually all business.…