Essays

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.

The result of a three-and-a-half-year quest, this Oscar-nominated drama is a high-water mark in the career of one of Hollywood’s most distinguished artists.

A war film that emphasizes personal drama over public platitude, this masterpiece by Mikhail Kalatozov features the vitality and freewheeling cinematic experimentation characteristic of post-Stalin cinema.

In this Technicolor film noir masterpiece, Gene Tierney stars as one of cinema’s most dangerous and sympathetic femmes fatales, a woman who finds it impossible to conform to postwar gender roles.

For one of the most provocative and eerily prescient films of his career, Spike Lee confronted the racist neo-minstrelsy that continues to pervade mass entertainment.

Chronicling the trials of a door-to-door salesman in midcentury America, this incisive portrait of consumer culture revolutionized the art of documentary filmmaking.

One of Czechoslovak cinema’s masters of illusion dazzled audiences with obsessively handcrafted fantasias that combined live action, animation, and the influence of nineteenth-century graphic illustration.

New York City’s 1980s drag-ball scene comes to vibrant life in Jennie Livingston’s documentary, a landmark chronicle of the resilience and realness of queer communities of color.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s seemingly irreconcilable allegiances to Marx, Freud, and Jesus Christ come to the fore in this radical provocation, which marks the midway point of the polymathic artist’s filmmaking career.

Alfonso Cuarón’s vivid re-creation of his childhood memories holds up a mirror to the social instability that roiled his hometown in the 1970s.

In a polarized and violent world, Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece offers a pure message of human solidarity that transcends class and race. But its story is also firmly rooted in the historical specificity of 1970s Mexico City.

Sidney Lumet brought his vivid sense of the messiness of human experience to this stark nuclear thriller, which centers on a series of earth-shattering decisions made in quiet rooms.

Of the many odes to motherhood in Pedro Almodóvar’s filmography, this Oscar-winning hit is the most exquisite exploration of maternal love’s all-consuming power.

One of the lesser-known films in Godard’s extraordinary run of 1960s masterpieces, this severe, angular thriller was the director’s first foray into the political territory that would prove so essential to his later work.

With the chemistry they perfected in their third collaboration, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant proved they were a match made in screwball heaven.

Twelve years after her debut film, Kelly Reichardt returned with this breakout feature, an exploration of the softer side of American masculinity that the director has called her version of a “New Age western.”

When he set out to make his dream project, Wim Wenders enlisted several of his favorite musical acts—including bands like U2 and Depeche Mode—to contribute to the film’s soundtrack.

Wim Wenders’ string of successes in the eighties freed him to mount one of the most ambitious productions in European film history, an epic he characterized as “the ultimate road movie.”

Often credited with inciting full enforcement of the Hays Code, this harrowing melodrama is one of the few Faulkner adaptations that successfully evokes the writer’s distinctive ambience and unsettling contradictions.

Full of booze, bons mots, and backstabbing, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s impeccably crafted showbiz drama is the rare movie where—as its star, Bette Davis, once put it—“it all came out right.”

Perhaps the quintessential woman’s film of its era, this saga of self-discovery captures Bette Davis at the height of her reign at Warner Bros.

Two lovers cross boundaries both personal and national in this ambitious, zigzagging love story, one of the most romantic films of this century.

Underneath its brilliantly colored, highly stylized surfaces, this key work of 1980s French cinema is a heartrending portrait of a woman struggling to both inhabit and reject traditionally feminine roles.

A scrappy comedy made on the cheap, Greg Mottola’s feature debut finds hilarity and heartbreak in the tale of one Long Island family’s Manhattan odyssey.