Essays

Unfolding in elaborately choreographed long takes, this sublime adaptation of László Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance captures the weight of time and the mood of fascism with a haunting palpability.

In her first fiction film, director Alice Diop brings the skills of observation she has learned from her documentary work to a thought-provoking exploration of race, power, and motherhood.

In Gus Van Sant’s wickedly funny tale of suburban depravity, Nicole Kidman plays a vacuous weather reporter whose hunger for fame anticipates our own era of digital celebrity.

One of the first postrevolutionary Iranian films screened and celebrated internationally, Amir Naderi’s autobiographical masterpiece is a lyrical exploration of childhood that showcases the director’s gift for radical simplicity.

In this profoundly emotional portrait of artist Nan Goldin, director Laura Poitras explores how her subject’s creative sensibility and commitment to activism spring from the same source.

Hollywood legend Raoul Walsh’s first movie for Warner Bros. is an epoch-spanning tall tale that takes inspiration from the New York City of his childhood and closes out a run of influential gangster films he inaugurated in the silent era.

Combining the influence of the wuxia genre, the Hong Kong New Wave filmmaking of the 1980s, and loony comic-book futurism, these two ass-kicking fantasias are dazzling showcases of female physicality.

Released at the height of the civil rights movement, this deceptively simple tale of a working-class Black man’s search for love and self-worth broke ground with its realism, nuance, and intensity.

Through its echoes, resonances, and intricately branching stories, this cycle of films evokes the feeling that life, like the weather, is based on patterns too complex to ever be fully predictable.

Shifting recklessly between realism and surrealism, this drug-fueled odyssey from director Danny Boyle is a propulsive satire of depleted masculinity in urban Scotland.

A kaleidoscopic work of literary adaptation, Dee Rees’s fourth feature film is anchored in a powerful fraternal bond between two men from opposite sides of the color line.

In the first ten years of her extraordinary career, the Belgian filmmaker used the raw materials of quotidian, marginal lives to spark a radical reinvention of cinema.

Drawing on the influence of a wide range of genres, John Sayles creates a densely layered narrative that unfolds across two timelines and explores the long-hidden secrets of a small border town in Texas.

This powerful adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio combines the novel’s ever-relevant critique of corrupt institutions with a fierce belief in kindness and selfless courage.

Imbuing stop-motion animation with vivid humanity, this ambitious take on a classic tale grapples with the realities of human suffering, fascism, and the parent-child bond.

Drawn to high-risk productions and propelled by his own technical ingenuity, French director Albert Lamorisse crafted some of cinema’s most beguiling visions of childhood, animals, and flight.

Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough feature—a rare example of a work of personal cinema with broad popular appeal—delivers all the elements of his future career in one spectacular, bravura throw-down.

In this late-career triumph, French thriller master Claude Chabrol asks what women are capable of when unencumbered by marriage, children, and class propriety.

In a string of wildly entertaining films released between the late seventies and the mideighties, Jackie Chan paved the way to his international stardom by turning himself into a real-life cartoon character.

With the full force of her imagination, director Nikyatu Jusu examines the complicated nature of Black motherhood, as well as the importance of Black communion as an antidote to racial oppression.

Influenced by haunted-house classics like The Innocents and Rebecca, this brilliantly restrained ghost story is a dramatization of extreme repression that builds toward an explosive reckoning.

The director of Freaks, The Unknown, and The Mystic tested the limits of early-Hollywood taste with his provocative visions of carnival life and society’s outcasts.

Brett Morgen’s portrait of David Bowie is a free-associative hybrid of pop history and imaginative extravaganza—impressionistic, eclectically allusive, and, above all, immersive.

In this vibrant, music-filled portrait of an artist and his community, director Luis Valdez gathers what little is known about rock-and-roll idol Ritchie Valens and fuses it with a lived-in understanding of what it is to be Chicano.