Essays

In their most sublime collaboration, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers perfected a seamless blend of song, dance, and swooning romance.

In this series of intense chamber dramas influenced by the work of August Strindberg, Ingmar Bergman grapples with Europe’s collective crisis of faith in the modern era.

In one of her most buoyant films, Agnès Varda captured the emotional complexities at the heart of women’s struggle to win autonomy over their own bodies.

With this controversial treatise on violence and media, Michael Haneke created a spectacle that is both intensely watchable and hard to stomach.

With the help of intense performances by Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift, William Wyler turns the genteel spaces of a Manhattan town house into an emotional battleground.

A celebrated work of Australian cinema, this deeply felt coming-of-age tale is fueled by the independent spirit of three remarkable female artists: novelist Miles Franklin, director Gillian Armstrong, and actor Judy Davis.

With these twin monuments of Hong Kong action filmmaking, Jackie Chan catapulted to international stardom, perfecting a unique blend of athleticism and populism.

With the current rise of faux-populist demagogues around the globe, this incisive satire of media’s toxic influence on politics is as relevant as it’s ever been.

Injecting the Czechoslovak New Wave with postmodern rage and formal risk, Jan Němec’s debut feature is a merciless look at human consciousness under siege.

At a time when Mexican audiences were taught to equate good cinema with foreign cinema, Carlos Reygadas heralded the arrival of something new with his audaciously poetic first feature.

Kicking off a career that would go on to explore the mysteries of pop culture, Robert Zemeckis’s first feature revisits the weekend the Beatles set youth culture ablaze with their American debut.

Obsessed with Edgar G. Ulmer’s B-movie masterpiece from the first time he saw it, writer Robert Polito dives deep into the past to unravel the mysteries surrounding a film that almost never existed.

In her sole feature-length directorial achievement, Barbara Loden eliminates the boundary between actor and character, crafting a revelatory portrait of a woman without an identity.

There was more to Harold Lloyd than laughter. In one of his best movies, the silent-film legend deftly balanced elements of action and romance with his signature slapstick set pieces.

Steeped in African American folklore, this sublime family portrait finds Charles Burnett departing from the naturalism of his early films and embracing elements of magic realism.

A master at adapting literary classics for the screen, Luchino Visconti made a bold choice in emphasizing the homoerotic undertones in Thomas Mann’s novella.

Brigitte Bardot delivers her greatest performance in what would be Henri-Georges Clouzot’s final masterpiece, a stinging indictment of a justice system run by a moralistic patriarchy.

In 1968, Ingmar Bergman channeled his anguish over the legacy of World War II and the escalating brutality in Vietnam into the most fiercely political film of his career.

Both a landmark film of the civil rights era and a complicated artifact of white liberalism, Norman Jewison’s Oscar-winning crime drama remains a powerful vision of racial tension and intimacy.

One of the crowning achievements of the New Romanian Cinema, Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner combines rigorous realism with breathtaking suspense in its account of women’s oppression during the era of Ceaușescu.

In her long-unsung masterpiece, Elaine May takes an unflinching, darkly comic look at the forces of toxic masculinity that play out in an eroding friendship between two mobsters.

In this pitch-perfect noir romance, Alfred Hitchcock explores what happens when the masks we wear in the world clash with our innermost desires.

After years of paring his filmmaking down to the bare essentials, Abbas Kiarostami delivered this gorgeous and boldly minimalist meditation on time, movement, and image-making.

Upon returning to France after a period of self-exile in Hollywood, Julien Duvivier adapted a Georges Simenon novel into this noirish critique of the dangers of mob mentality during wartime.