Features

With movies that spoke urgently to the nation post-independence, the director forged a path between the realist tendencies of the era’s art-house cinema and the pleasures of popular genre filmmaking.

One of the world’s most passionate cinephiles, Bertrand Tavernier, passed away last month. His longtime friend celebrates the enduring legacy of his filmmaking, his ideas, and his advocacy of underappreciated artists.

Bill Haley and His Comets’ generation-defining hit “Rock Around the Clock” comes through like a seismic, uncontrollable force in Paweł Pawlikowski’s meticulously crafted romance.

The Oscar-nominated director of Another Round tells us why Ingmar Bergman has always been a cinematic role model for him and what he learned from the Swedish auteur’s approach to capturing human behavior.

In her hypnotic, uncategorizable films, the director serves as a channel for images that emerge from deep within her unconscious.

A rare example of a bold political film released by a major American studio, this portrait of the struggle for Black liberation embodied the great actor’s mission to fuse art with activism.

In his middle age, Ol’ Blue Eyes embraced a tired, tormented persona on-screen, one that allowed him to show off his formidable acting chops.

Few films have captured the recklessness and melancholy of youth more vividly than this underappreciated short film, made the same year as Teshigahara’s widely acknowledged masterpiece, Woman in the Dunes.

During the 1970s, an incredibly fertile decade for unorthodox approaches to film scoring, the composer of The Parallax View and Klute came into prominence with an out-of-the-box sound that captured the dread of the era.

Part of a generation of Black artists who believed their vocations were tied to the pride and struggle of their community, the late acting legend lived by her mission to “mirror the times and propel them forward.”

The celebrated photographer captured some of the most legendary American and European auteurs during the golden age of art-house cinema, including Federico Fellini and Luis Buñuel.

In the 1970s, a decade when blaxploitation ruled, Lady Sings the Blues offered a rare tender vision of Black love and masculinity.

Bill Duke’s feature debut is a rarity in American cinema: a labor film, funded by unions and public money, that balances political urgency with emotional tenderness.

A close friend and collaborator of Carrière’s reflects on the late writer’s fearless approach to the creative process and the source of his staggering productivity.

Rooted in their trailblazing work as archivists of Black culture, the duo’s transgressively candid documentaries combine revelations of family life with cultural analysis.

In the actor’s inimitable comedic work, he undercut his trademark suavity with moments of slapstick mayhem, creating a contrast that hinted at the chasm between his private life and public persona.

A powerful motif in film noir from around the world, dance is by turns a tool of seduction, a source of humiliation, and a symbol of the pleasures and risks of spectatorship.

A domestic ritual inspires feelings of resentment, nostalgia, and aesthetic passion in this short documentary from 1981.

Trans representation in cinema is nothing new. A string of pioneering publications from the past century reveal how trans audiences responded to seeing their community depicted on-screen.

Shortly after the 2020 election, this award-winning writer reflected on the massive Hollywood blockbuster that became an unexpected source of political emotion for her in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory.

In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking, the briefly heard Japanese pop hit that inspired the film’s title is both a portal to long-buried memories and a minor detail that resists interpretation.

With the future of film exhibition more uncertain than ever, several small-scale organizations with highly personal curation are proving they have what it takes to survive against the odds.

Before ringing in the new year, we’re taking a look back at some of the most memorable essays and interviews we published in 2020.

With her contralto drawl, genius for innuendo, and fierce control behind the camera, this great Hollywood provocateur pioneered a sex-positive cinema far ahead of its time.