Essays

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.

Three decades into her iconic career, Barbara Stanwyck delivered her final great film performance in Samuel Fuller’s ribald and fiercely feminist twist on the western.

Director Euzhan Palcy put herself at personal risk to make this powerful indictment of racism in South Africa, released at the climax of the anti-apartheid movement.

David Byrne cracked open the profound strangeness of small-town Texas in this wonderfully symphonic film, his sole foray into narrative-feature directing.

The Magnificent Ambersons

With The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles created a model of period filmmaking, lightly deploying historical signifiers while focusing on the haunting power of his actors’ faces.

The Magnificent Ambersons

Unlike his adaptations of Shakespeare and Kafka, Orson Welles’s take on a Pulitzer Prize winner by Booth Tarkington is remarkably faithful to its source.

The Magnificent Ambersons

The legendary filmmaker possessed the greatest speaking voice in American cinema, and The Magnificent Ambersons represents the summit of his work as a vocal actor.

The Magnificent Ambersons

The holiest of holies for lovers of ruined and neglected cinema, Orson Welles’s 1942 masterpiece haunts us with its voids and absences, which echo its tale of a family’s destruction.

The Magnificent Ambersons

Even as he chronicles the downfall of an American family, Orson Welles brings a sense of buoyancy to this grim saga through his virtuoso storytelling.

Billy Wilder proves himself one of cinema’s greatest pleasure seekers in this irresistible confection, a landmark of Hollywood comedy.

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

This sensuous, sprawling epic, which Ingmar Bergman intended to be his swan song, offers an effortless summing up of the themes—among them family, identity, and mortality—he'd spent a career exploring.

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

In two made-for-television productions, a middle-aged Ingmar Bergman blurred the boundaries between screen and stage.

Turning to theater for inspiration, Kenji Mizoguchi transformed a popular eighteenth-century play into a spiritually charged meditation on forbidden love and societal oppression.

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Critically maligned upon their release, Ingmar Bergman’s only two English-language films show the master’s artistry at its most restrained and its most convoluted.

Ridiculous on the outside but full of truth on the inside, Rob Reiner’s fairy-tale classic is a childhood touchstone for generations of movie lovers.

Brian De Palma found his home in the psychological thriller with this chilling tale of murder, which twists genre conventions to investigate the perils of looking and the pitfalls of subjectivity.