This Beautiful Fantastic

Feb 26, 2020 — Karel Zeman belonged to an obsessive fringe fellowship of moviemakers that stretched right back to the medium’s first formative days—a lineage of auteurs who believed in cinema as a full-blown daydream machine, capable of realizing inhabitable fantasias. These were filmmakers—practical-effects...

Apr 13, 2018 — Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov explored his Transcaucasian roots in this visually spectacular and wonderfully strange ode to the Armenian poet Sayat-Nova.

Sep 29, 2017 — One of the most elusive artists in American cinema opens a window onto his private life and creative methods in this revelatory documentary.

Jul 18, 2017 — With a weeklong run of our new restoration of Desert Hearts opening at the IFC Center in New York, we spoke with director Donna Deitch about this landmark of LGBT filmmaking.

Sep 27, 2016 — This monumental meditation on the Ten Commandments captures the spiritual undercurrents of life in late-Communist Poland.

Apr 14, 2015 — Before he turned Vienna into a labyrinth of shadows with The Third Man, Carol Reed brought film noir to Belfast for this stylishly fatalistic tale of a man caught up in political violence.

Feb 17, 2014 — Flailing fathers, anxious mothers, and their moody offspring—these characters may have tails, but they’re Wes Anderson people through and through.

Dec 5, 2005 — If there is a skeleton key to François Truffaut’s oeuvre, it is this film, in which all of his assorted gifts and preoccupations are in play and meshed into a uniquely idiosyncratic whole.

May 5, 2026 — The nation’s largest silent film festival returns to the newly renovated Castro Theatre.

Sep 30, 2025 — Three films of wonder and wandering: Mare’s Nest, Dry Leaf, and Drunken Noodles.