Essays

Mitchell Leisen’s marvelously chic and brilliantly constructed screwball classic revolves around a heroine who flounders through a succession of complications but always manages to come out ahead.

Drawing from over a dozen hours of black-and-white footage, Direct Cinema pioneer Charlotte Zwerin created this elliptical and moving portrait of one of American music’s most original artists.

Sidney Lumet’s lavish adaptation of a Tony Award–winning stage musical combines an ecstatic appreciation of Black artistry with a celebration of freedom and perseverance.

Suffused with slapstick humor and slightly surreal wit, Richard Lester’s beloved take on a frequently adapted adventure epic embodies a style of extravagant filmmaking that didn’t survive long past the 1970s.

A landmark of independent cinema, Charles Burnett’s debut feature captures daily life in Watts, Los Angeles, with a depth and precision that evokes the history of Black American music.

A film about and against everything, this astonishingly original comedy attacks Big Brother, the bomb, and the incipient collapse of our planetary ecosystem, along with the lies that stop us from recognizing all of the above.

Set in the dying days of the 1960s, Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical tale of two unemployed actors is a triumph of screenwriting and a brilliant showcase for then-unknown stars Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann.

In this masterpiece of lived-in ethical complexity and high spiritual stakes, Abbas Kiarostami explores the tensions between provinciality and modernity, and between artists and their subjects.

A gritty look at New York City’s underground economy through the eyes of an immigrant street hustler, Sean Baker’s third feature film demonstrates his gift for combining hardscrabble social realism and mischievous humor.

Drawing from a rich tradition of films that depict the lives of sex workers, Sean Baker’s Oscar-winning triumph takes a complex approach to exploring the fundamentally transactional nature of human relationships.

In this exuberant and moving portrait of a Brooklyn sex worker, Sean Baker draws on themes he has explored throughout his career, depicting the workaday grind of twenty-first-century American existence with biting humor and clear-eyed humanity.

A black-and-white version of Julian Schnabel’s portrait of his fellow artist and friend Jean-Michel Basquiat accentuates the film’s melancholy mood while highlighting the deep commitment of Jeffrey Wright’s performance.

The majestic landscape of Provence takes center stage in Claude Berri’s two-film adaptation of an epic tale by Marcel Pagnol, a cinematic treasure that remains an abiding source of comfort for French viewers.

Set in a grimy, unglamorous version of Los Angeles, Arthur Penn’s Watergate-era neonoir tells the story of an honorable private eye acutely conscious of living in an era that is the mere shadow of a nobler past.

Unfettered by the precepts of bourgeois morality and the nuclear family, the characters in Alan Rudolph’s romantic drama struggle to find happiness as they navigate love’s whims and ambiguities.

This stellar entry in one of cinema’s greatest monster franchises combines science fiction’s age-old exploration of human arrogance with the full force of cinematic imagination.

In what he described as his “first serious drama,” Charlie Chaplin channeled the influence of modernist literature, foreign cinema, and his European travels into a work of striking formal sophistication.

Misunderstood on release and mishandled by its distributor, this genuine cult classic opened the door to a radical new way of making films.

Gus Van Sant’s lyrical exploration of addiction and faith—adapted from an autobiographical novel by James Fogle—influenced cinematic drug depictions throughout the nineties and helped to initiate a wave of American independent filmmaking.

In her mainstream breakthrough, director Joan Micklin Silver envisions New York City through the eyes of a complicated, searching woman trying to figure out her place in the world.

Jean-Luc Godard’s first English-language narrative feature is a postapocalyptic fantasy that shifts from antic humor to tragic grandeur while challenging deep-rooted assumptions about what a Shakespearean movie should be.

The first of eight collaborations between actor James Stewart and director Anthony Mann centers on a prize rifle that ends up being both a magical object and a cursed one, sending every man who possesses it to a doomed fate.

In his first Hollywood film, British director Stephen Frears dives into the nihilistic world of Jim Thompson’s fiction, delivering an adaptation profoundly attuned to the novelist’s sense of ineluctable suffering.

In his only directorial effort for the big screen, Richard Pryor takes the raw stuff of his life and alchemizes it as art, demonstrating the humor and vulnerability that made him a towering figure in American culture.