Second Act

Nov 18, 2025 — Though the first two decades of the Iranian filmmaker’s career have long been underappreciated, this fertile period yielded philosophical and restlessly innovative works that reinvigorated both documentary and narrative-fiction cinema.

Dec 11, 2024 — Sean Baker’s eighth feature has been picking up awards and nominations and landing on several best-of-2024 lists.

Apr 25, 2023 — In his second Palme d’Or–winning film, Ruben Östlund uses familiar reality-television tropes to stage a deeply unnerving spectacle of obscene wealth and class outrage.

Jan 11, 2022 — A searing melodrama that lays bare the trauma wrought by white supremacy and privilege, Thomas Vinterberg’s second feature kick-started the Dogme 95 movement.

Sep 13, 2018 — The imitation of nature becomes a devotional act in Terrence Malick’s cinema, which reaches sublime heights in this exploration of childhood, memory, and grief.

Feb 18, 2014 — The immediacy of an ongoing war electrifies Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful second Hollywood feature.

Jun 30, 2008 — The novelist Mishima Yukio stepped behind the camera to adapt his own short story, which depicts the act of seppuku as a thing of beauty.

Jun 13, 2005 — Ernst Lubitsch was a big-city director. The historical dramas that he made in Germany in the late 1910s and early 1920s were known around the world for their distinctively urbane approach, focusing on the private lives of public people. This...

Jan 5, 2004 — Jacques Tati’s second tale about the whimsical wanderer Monsieur Hulot, this classic comedy presents a world in which characters are defined solely by their actions.

Nov 11, 2002 — A second Monterey International Pop Festival has for the past month been put in jeopardy by a vicious handful of citizens, cops, and city officials in a small-town drama straight from Peyton Place and The Invaders.