Essays

A film of volatile emotions that provides no catharsis, John Cassavetes’s exploration of masculinity finds the director at his most existential and abstract.

Martin Scorsese’s stylistically varied early short films reveal the energy and invention that would make him one of the most exciting American directors of his time.

In this remarkably restrained adaptation of a Richard Ford novel, the midcentury American dream gives way to harsh reality as one Montana family begins to fall apart.

Pioneering Hollywood filmmaker Dorothy Arzner brought a rare feminist sensibility to this backstage drama that explores the role of ambition, friendship, and love in the lives of two dancers.

John Sturges’s POW drama is an ode to ingenuity and cooperation that anticipated a wave of demythologizing war films.

Miranda July took her punk spirit and wild imagination to the big screen with this first feature, which explores universal themes of shame and pain through her singular voice.

The characters in Miranda July’s film long for a radical vulnerability that remains forever beyond their grasp.

Juraj Herz’s macabre tale of madness epitomizes the artistic and political audacity of Czechoslovak cinema during its golden age of liberalization, a period that would soon prove to be short-lived.

After a career drought, Marlene Dietrich roared back to fame and acclaim with this ingenious comedy-western hybrid, made in what is widely considered one of the peak years of the studio system.

A landmark stage musical receives its greatest cinematic treatment in this beautifully mounted saga that reflects the changing state of race relations across three generations.

The result of a three-and-a-half-year quest, this Oscar-nominated drama is a high-water mark in the career of one of Hollywood’s most distinguished artists.

A war film that emphasizes personal drama over public platitude, this masterpiece by Mikhail Kalatozov features the vitality and freewheeling cinematic experimentation characteristic of post-Stalin cinema.

In this Technicolor film noir masterpiece, Gene Tierney stars as one of cinema’s most dangerous and sympathetic femmes fatales, a woman who finds it impossible to conform to postwar gender roles.

For one of the most provocative and eerily prescient films of his career, Spike Lee confronted the racist neo-minstrelsy that continues to pervade mass entertainment.

Chronicling the trials of a door-to-door salesman in midcentury America, this incisive portrait of consumer culture revolutionized the art of documentary filmmaking.

One of Czechoslovak cinema’s masters of illusion dazzled audiences with obsessively handcrafted fantasias that combined live action, animation, and the influence of nineteenth-century graphic illustration.

New York City’s 1980s drag-ball scene comes to vibrant life in Jennie Livingston’s documentary, a landmark chronicle of the resilience and realness of queer communities of color.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s seemingly irreconcilable allegiances to Marx, Freud, and Jesus Christ come to the fore in this radical provocation, which marks the midway point of the polymathic artist’s filmmaking career.

Alfonso Cuarón’s vivid re-creation of his childhood memories holds up a mirror to the social instability that roiled his hometown in the 1970s.

In a polarized and violent world, Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece offers a pure message of human solidarity that transcends class and race. But its story is also firmly rooted in the historical specificity of 1970s Mexico City.

Sidney Lumet brought his vivid sense of the messiness of human experience to this stark nuclear thriller, which centers on a series of earth-shattering decisions made in quiet rooms.

Of the many odes to motherhood in Pedro Almodóvar’s filmography, this Oscar-winning hit is the most exquisite exploration of maternal love’s all-consuming power.

One of the lesser-known films in Godard’s extraordinary run of 1960s masterpieces, this severe, angular thriller was the director’s first foray into the political territory that would prove so essential to his later work.

With the chemistry they perfected in their third collaboration, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant proved they were a match made in screwball heaven.