Essays

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.

Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3

With his deeply political but unclassifiable debut feature, Med Hondo set out to establish a transformational presence for global African cinema and to accelerate the emergence of a new Africa.

Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3

With humor and verve, Bahram Beyzaie’s Iranian New Wave classic captures a moment in Iranian history when dissent against the authoritarian shah was beginning to percolate below the surface.

Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3

Made at a time when the Mexican film industry was searching for its own identity, this boldly stylized melodrama anticipated an experimental cinema that was never given adequate room to develop.

Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3

Drawing from a longstanding tradition of neorealist naturalism in Brazilian cinema, Héctor Babenco’s third feature is a brutal tale of urban survival that became his international breakthrough.

Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3

Humberto Solás’s ambitious epic unites the imperatives of postrevolutionary Cuban cinema, capturing lived experience in a time of rapid change while also rescuing the past from distortion and amnesia.

Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3

In this masterpiece from the father of modern Indonesian cinema, Usmar Ismail, a violent military culture grips the nation in the years following a brutal revolution.

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.