The Dependent

Sep 29, 2003 — Fassbinder had long dreamed of a “German Hollywood film.” He sought not only success with the audience, but also professionalism. The auteur film in its purest form is an attempt to abolish the division of labor: the filmmaker represents in...

Feb 3, 2021 — The lauded star of film, television, and theater was “determined to do all I could to alter the narrative about Black people.”

Dec 21, 2017 — In this excerpt from an interview on our edition of The Piano Teacher, the Austrian director discusses the mechanics of one of the film’s most shocking sequences.

Sep 24, 2024 — Emerging out of the mass death, cultural ferment, and semiotic tumult of the 1990s, this trio of deliriously profane films glares at American youth culture and gives zero shits if it looks back.

Dec 8, 2023 — Roy Waller (Nicolas Cage), the jittery protagonist of Ridley Scott’s 2003 crime comedy Matchstick Men, doesn’t like to think of himself as a common crook. “I’m a con artist,” he insists, and—in a frenzy of self-justification—further explains: “They give me...

May 1, 2018 — Working within the strict rules and tight budget of a commissioned television project, one of France’s finest contemporary directors made an artistic breakthrough that would go on to define his career.

Apr 27, 2009 — Stephen Frears’s gangland drama subverts its genre by removing its villains to an alternate mythic universe, that of the western, as its protagonists traverse the roads that snake through Spain’s arid hills and plains.

Aug 26, 2025 — Alice Wu’s feature debut is a romantic comedy in which the most compelling relationship is the one between a young queer Chinese American woman and her long-widowed mother.

Aug 28, 2023 — Throughout her four-decade career as a writer and director, Susan Seidelman has told complex stories about unconventional women striving to express themselves and maintain their autonomy. Her genre-melding films fuse a passion for the pleasures of Hollywood spectacle with a...

Mar 30, 2021 — Mike Leigh’s midcareer masterpiece is one of the finest examples of his ability to construct riveting drama from ordinary life.