Essays

A monument of Italian literature, Carlo Levi’s novelistic memoir comes to the screen in a remarkably faithful adaptation that habituates viewers to close, attentive perception.

Grafted together from a wide array of sources, Claire Denis’s most acclaimed film combines cerebral rigor, sensorial intensity, and a powerful meditation on masculinity and foreignness.

The great director established himself as a voice of the left with this poetic tale set on the working-class margins of French society.

This triumph of Direct Cinema captures a high-profile moment in the history of second-wave feminism in all its heady, histrionic glory.

The sensibilities of three inimitable storytellers—Ian McEwan, Harold Pinter, and Paul Schrader—complement one another in this slow-burning erotic tale of two couples in Venice.

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.