The Human Experience

Sep 28, 2021 — The first Black-directed movie musical of the modern film era, Melvin Van Peebles’s drama illuminates the cultural and political concerns of working-class Black people with delight and fancy.

Mar 18, 2021 — The range this month is wide, from Tsai Ming-liang to Ida Lupino, from Tobe Hooper to Josephine Baker.

May 28, 2019 — It has taken me forty years to appreciate the audacity of Agnès Varda in writing and directing One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977). Not only did Varda make her subject the most crucial and vexed issue of the feminist movement, at that...

Apr 19, 2018 — With a mix of improvisation, balletic physicality, and slapstick humor, Hollywood master Leo McCarey crafted the most sublime of screwball comedies.

Oct 10, 2017 — Two singing mermaid sisters take 1980s Poland by storm in this extravagantly mounted musical-horror hybrid.

Oct 22, 2013 — This delicately creepy Hollywood horror movie lives up to its reputation as a classic of the genre.

Apr 23, 2013 — Who is Pierre Etaix and where has he been all your life? This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in...

Dec 16, 2008 — Science-fiction drama, western, love story, metaphysical mystery, and satire of modern America, Nicolas Roeg’s beguiling film established him as a mainstream heir to such 1960s experimentalists as Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chris Marker.

Aug 25, 2025 — In such provocative delights as Jamón jamón and Golden Balls, one of Spain’s most original directors celebrates the sensual pleasures of food and sex while capturing the rapid changes his country experienced at the turn of the millennium.

Aug 20, 2025 — He locked eyes with audiences in films by Pasolini, Soderbergh, Frears, Stephen Elliott, and Edgar Wright.