The Theme

Jul 23, 2024 — Chen Kaige’s sweeping epic chronicles the history of twentieth-century China through the story of two childhood friends, contrasting the unchanging traditions of their Beijing-opera milieu with the nation’s swift and turbulent transformation.

Jun 26, 2023 — The Cinemateca Brasileira programs an odd pairing, but it all comes together in 1983.

Jun 20, 2023 — In their first collaboration, director Joseph Losey and screenwriter Harold Pinter explore the cultural fissures in modern England by dramatizing a kind of role-play in which no role is stable or easy to define.

Aug 8, 2018 — New films by Karyn Kusama, Alex Ross Perry, and Benjamín Naishtat will compete in the Platform program.

Sep 16, 2016 — Critic Phillip Lopate explores the duality of the director’s approach to his female protagonists and asks whether his films are proto- or antifeminist.

Nov 16, 2010 — The Night of the Hunter (1955)—the first film directed by Charles Laughton and also, sadly, the last—is among the greatest horror movies ever made, and perhaps, of that select company, the most irreducibly American in spirit. It’s about those venerable...

May 21, 2007 — Carol Reed’s masterpiece dives deep into the life and mind of screenwriter Graham Greene, one of Britain’s greatest postwar novelist.

Aug 14, 2026 — Fine writing on Powell and Pressburger, James Gray, Catherine Breillat, and Richard Linklater—plus: Isabelle Huppert on Claude Chabrol.

Feb 14, 2025 — The director of Down with Love talks about his favorite romantic comedies set in the great metropolis and looks back on the making of his own foray into the genre.

Feb 11, 2025 — Jean-Luc Godard’s first English-language narrative feature is a postapocalyptic fantasy that shifts from antic humor to tragic grandeur while challenging deep-rooted assumptions about what a Shakespearean movie should be.