Essays

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

So unique and propulsive was Agnès Varda’s vision that she could be said to be her own ancestor and her own progeny.

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

Suffused with a palpable love for her subjects, Agnès Varda’s nonfiction work investigates the complex interrelations between self and community, public and private.

The Complete Films of Agnès Varda

Over the course of an extraordinary six-decade career, Agnès Varda fused her feminist politics with an original artistic practice that made her a leading figure of the French New Wave.

Once dismissed as overly topical, this New German Cinema masterpiece is now regarded as an enduringly relevant indictment of surveillance capitalism and patriarchal oppression.

The first Iranian film to win the Palme d’Or, Abbas Kiarostami’s tale of one man’s despair leaves the question of whether life is worth living unanswered.

Hollywood has never produced a comedy more acutely witty, more sexually playful, or more unexpectedly moving than this flawlessly engineered masterpiece by Preston Sturges.

With his grace, power, and purpose, the martial artist turned himself into a global pop-culture icon, showing audiences what it takes to advance through the everyday labor of life.

The first and most influential film adaptation of H. G. Wells’s sci-fi classic, this brilliantly imagined vision of apocalypse captured American anxieties at the height of the Cold War.

With extraordinary immediacy, Elem Klimov’s magisterial final film brings to life the barbarity of war, a subject of which the director had firsthand knowledge.

In postwar Belarus, where documents were either inaccessible or had been destroyed, the cowriter of Come and See pioneered a new form of literature sourced from the nightmarish testimonies of survivors.

Kon Ichikawa aimed to show “the sweat” and “the pathos” of athletic ambition in this monumental documentary, the most extravagant Olympic film to date.

Art becomes a tool for remaking one’s world in this unforgettable depiction of lesbian love, a film that director Céline Sciamma has called “a manifesto about the female gaze.”

Buster Keaton struggled with higher-ups at MGM while making his last great film, which the studio would later hold up as a model of a perfectly constructed comedy.

Paul Mazursky’s candid tale of self-discovery reflects feminist politics of the 1970s while also hearkening back to the glories of classic Hollywood women’s pictures.

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.