The Challenge

Jun 11, 2007 — Claude Berri’s witty comedy-drama depicts Nazi sympathizers with three-dimensional candor, neither whitewashing nor apologizing for their misguided ideas.

Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...

Aug 27, 2020 — In his novel All the Rest Have Died (1964), about his experience as a young actor in New York, Bill Gunn wrote, “I was always only slightly aware of the injustice the Black artist suffers while trying to create in...

Feb 25, 2016 — In Antonio Pietrangeli’s stunning 1967 character study I Knew Her Well, Stefania Sandrelli plays Adriana, an aspiring model and actress trying to make it in sixties Rome’s movie business and glittering social world. For Sandrelli, who was only nineteen years...

Aug 16, 2011 — “It is my best film. I always loved it. I always believed in it. It is real cinema, done for cinema—like art for art.” That was Roman Polanski’s view of Cul-de-sac in 1970, four years after its release and just...

Nov 23, 2010 — Easy Rider is a record of a certain time in American history, and a chronicle of a culture clash that never quite ended.

Oct 18, 2009 —  So many worlds stream in from every direction in Monsoon Wedding that it comes to seem as if the whole globe is converging on a single family home in New Delhi: relatives from Houston, from Australia, from Dubai (“Muscat, actually”);...

May 11, 2009 — Novelists learn not to expect too much when their books are made into movies. Obviously, great fiction has been turned into great cinema, but the dents and scrapes that so many classics have sustained on the rocky road from the...

Oct 16, 2025 — This month, join us for a Thanksgiving feast of some of the movies’ most memorable family reunions, or delve into the dark alleyways of noir mysteries built around protagonists tormented by amnesia, memory holes, and drunken blackouts.

Oct 2, 2025 — The festival presents new films from Gianfranco Rosi, Kahlil Joseph, Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, and Lucrecia Martel.