Essays

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.

Ousmane Sembène’s second feature departs from his early-career critiques of colonial power, instead focusing on the oppressive forces manifested within postcolonial African society.

Alan J. Pakula captured the anxiety of the seventies in this noir-inflected conspiracy thriller, which offers a critique both of American institutions and of the self-made heroes who do battle with them.

Set against a forbidding backdrop of war, this masterpiece of Soviet cinema contemplates the sources of evil while also searching for signs of meaning and divinity in a fallen world.

Combining elements of truth and artifice, Martin Scorsese’s documentary of Bob Dylan’s 1975–76 tour captures the legendary singer-songwriter brimming with confidence and at the peak of his gifts.

Bing Liu’s extraordinary debut feature was originally conceived as a documentary about skaters around the country and ultimately became an unflinching exploration of family, trauma, and the filmmaker’s own life.

Luis Buñuel weaved together multiple strands of his artistry in his final film, which blends the surrealism of his early years, the melodrama of his 1950s work, and the elegant erotic comedy of his late career.

Luis Buñuel lays bare the amorality and illogic of human affairs in the slew of straight-faced absurdities that make up his penultimate film.

Crazy things keep happening in Luis Buñuel’s perverse comedy of manners, a film that coolly deconstructs itself at every turn.

Capturing the tense mood of a new millennium, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s debut feature explores the hidden spaces of Mexico City at a moment of political turbulence and extreme social stratification.

With its thought-provoking structure, interweaving story lines, and saturated colors, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s debut feature represented a quantum leap in the audiovisual grammar of Mexican cinema.

In one of the most controversial films of his career, David Cronenberg adapts a scandalous J. G. Ballard novel, radically overhauling its story to address a society paralyzed in the headlights of a new millennium.

Sprawling across more than half a century of American history, Martin Scorsese’s crime saga combines epic ambition with a mood of isolation and dissolution.

With roots in Italian neorealism, Federico Fellini’s beguiling body of work moved beyond that movement to embrace the coalescing of real life and dream life.

In this highly quotable, opera-infused romantic comedy, Norman Jewison finds endless possibilities in a world dominated by constricting binaries.

Two Zen masters of contemporary American cinema—Jim Jarmusch and Forest Whitaker—explore masculine codes of honor in this postmodern mix of the samurai and gangster genres.

In his final film of the twentieth century, Jim Jarmusch evokes the tragic weight of history while also anticipating the mythical identities of a social-media-saturated future.

With rare immediacy and subtlety, Claudia Weill’s low-budget feature debut explores how the fraught dynamics of women’s friendships can be every bit as complex as a love affair.

Made after the dawn of second-wave feminism, this tale of two aspiring women artists depicts their sisterhood as resistance against a patriarchal order.

In his tension-filled, black-comic Oscar winner, Bong Joon Ho masterfully mixes tones and subverts genres in order to shine a harsh light on the mechanisms that maintain class inequality.

Subverting the archetypes and redemptive tropes of the western, Henry King’s melancholy tale of violence peers into the soul of a legendary gunslinger.

During a pivotal time for Black cinema, John Berry’s beautifully lived-in drama offered a portrait of an African American family that stood in opposition to a long history of harmful stereotypes.