Essays

Dismissed as gossip-column fodder in its time, Jacques Deray’s cooly enigmatic villa thriller is an exploration of masculine vanity and feminine disillusion.

Set against the backdrop of the war on drugs, Bill Duke’s boldly stylized thriller stages a meeting between the idea of noir and the idea of Black film.

Lizzie Borden’s groundbreaking drama scrutinizes the gender and labor relations that structure brothel-based sex work.

The fourth of Andrei Tarkovsky’s seven features is his most oneiric and resistant to interpretation, drawing from the director’s own childhood memories to create a fluid sense of history.

Howard Hawks’s madcap battle of the sexes is a reminder of how necessary and sneakily profound silliness can be.

In Dee Rees’s ambitious and lyrical debut, the inner life of a queer Black teenager and poet is summoned in all its nuances and contradictions.

The multi-hyphenate artist’s staggering and frequently autobiographical body of work reimagines the depiction of Black people in American culture, encouraging us to question everything we see.

This omnibus documentary captures the remarkable peculiarities of athletic striving in the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.

These landmark documentary portraits of intergenerational struggle in Seattle expose social horrors while also revealing the humanity of their subjects.

In Edmund Goulding’s gritty cult classic, Tyrone Power casts off his matinee-idol image to play a conniving carnival barker on the flipside of the American dream.

Hou Hsiao-hsien captures the power dynamics of courtesan life in this intoxicating portrait of the late Qing dynasty.

Dorothy Arzner’s deeply cynical portrait of marriage exemplifies the director’s ambivalence toward the norms dictating female behavior, wielding ironic detachment to mask one woman’s simmering inner turmoil.

One of the most influential high-school movies ever made, Amy Heckerling’s debut feature is both a raunchy crowd-pleaser and a keen sociological snapshot of teen culture.

In what became his biggest hit to date, Olivier Assayas turned his methods of postmodern reflection onto his own medium, which was being drastically transformed by digitization and globalization at the end of the twentieth century.

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.