Essays

Juzo Itami’s tragicomic directorial debut has scandalous fun with the Japanese traditions governing death.

Joseph Losey’s sumptuous portrait of Nazi-occupied Paris sees an icy Alain Delon as an art dealer on a Kafkaesque quest for identity.

In their ambitious debut feature, brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri capture the vibrancy of contemporary Lagos while also showing the desperation with which its two protagonists seek to leave it.

A longtime lover of jazz, Bertrand Tavernier honors its legacy by throwing the spotlight on real musicians—including legendary tenor sax player Dexter Gordon—improvising on-screen.

Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist fable deploys barbed humor and surreal flourishes to depict class solidarity and human kindness in postwar Italy.

Frank Tashlin directs Jayne Mansfield to her cartoonish limits in this outrageous showbiz satire that is a testament to the power of bad taste.

Theodore Witcher’s moody, sensual romance foregrounds Black artists and their milieu, upending stereotypes about urban life.

At once euphoric and elegiac, Martin Scorsese’s concert documentary captures the members of the Band on the brink of spiritual and physical collapse as they mount their transcendent final send-off.

In Robert Aldrich’s epic disaster film, James Stewart leads a pack of temperamentally different men as they struggle to survive in the face of the unknown—a template that would go on to influence Hollywood blockbusters for decades to come.

A parable of wayward women in a world without mothers, Márta Mészáros’s 1975 feature catapulted the Hungarian auteur to international prominence.

The fourth feature by the Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui devastatingly lays bare the conditions that spurred hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to flee after the fall of Saigon.

In centering the perspectives of refugees, Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui created a work of political solidarity that stands in contrast to the dehumanizing cinematic depictions of Vietnam from the period.

Playful irreverence gives way to tragedy and transcendence in Leo McCarey’s 1939 masterwork, one of the defining romances of the Hollywood studio era.

The first major Hollywood movie directed by an African American, Gordon Parks’s debut feature imbues a coming-of-age story with the visual sensibility he had developed in his celebrated career as a photographer.

A Prohibition-era gangster saga, the Coen brothers’ third feature is an enigmatic fable of violence, loyalty, and existential unease.

Douglas Sirk’s 1956 masterpiece is a visceral tragedy that lays bare the spiritual malaise of the ruling class.

A Victorian-era tale of self-discovery, Jane Campion’s Palme d’Or winner exults in the thrill of female rebellion.

By repeatedly staging the death of the filmmaker’s father with tragicomic flair, Kirsten Johnson’s hybrid documentary grapples with the realities of dementia and finds grace.

Unlike any other prison documentary before it, Garrett Bradley’s masterwork poetically evokes the subjective experience of a family whose lives have been fractured by incarceration.

A searing melodrama that lays bare the trauma wrought by white supremacy and privilege, Thomas Vinterberg’s second feature kick-started the Dogme 95 movement.

Regina King’s feature-film directorial debut envisions the true-life convergence of four prominent Black figures with empathy and moral urgency.

With the candor and rage of many hip-hop albums of the nineties, the Hughes brothers’ controversial debut feature depicts Watts as a pitiless urban war zone with no exit.

The Safdie brothers explore money, basketball, and racial tensions in this manic tale of a New York City jewelry dealer’s existential meltdown.

Modern in conception but postmodern in effect, the film hailed by many as the greatest ever made has been the subject of cinephilic passion and intense critical analysis since its release in 1941.