Fear of Fear

The director of The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being selects a group of films that he hopes will inspire him in his own work, including Amarcord, The Wages of Fear, Fanny and Alexander, and The Battle of...

Apr 22, 2025 — The majestic landscape of Provence takes center stage in Claude Berri’s two-film adaptation of an epic tale by Marcel Pagnol, a cinematic treasure that remains an abiding source of comfort for French viewers.

Jan 17, 2023 — One of contemporary cinema’s most provocative filmmakers launched his career with three deeply unnerving, deliriously genre-blending portraits of Europe.

Nov 8, 2022 — In her first film that places a male character front and center, Jane Campion trains her unsparing gaze on the brutality of patriarchal power and the pain of repressed homoerotic desire.

Oct 18, 2018 — Separated by more than a decade in Ingmar Bergman’s filmography, these two formally masterful dramas uncover the ugliness of male aggression and brutality.

Feb 11, 2017 — Ermanno Olmi captures the dignity of work in this painterly vision of late nineteenth-century rural Italy.

Jan 13, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s characters play an endlessly layered game of dress-up in this tale of sadomasochistic love.

Feb 24, 2003 — Few political films transcend their historic moment quite like Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s depiction of West Germany in 1975, when the anxiety about terrorism eroded basic democratic values.

Jan 15, 1996 — If Akira Kurosawa is the John Ford of Japanese samurai dramas, then director Kihachi Okamoto—a specialist in action films, with a particulat accent on violence and raw characterizations—is the samurai film’s Sam Fuller.

Sep 26, 2025 — One of the most provocative subgenres of 1970s exploitation cinema, nunsploitation explores the collision of sex and religious dogma through stories of desperately horny women of the cloth.