One of cinema’s great iconoclasts and mischief makers, Spanish master Luis Buñuel combined surrealist non sequiturs with taboo-shattering attacks on the bourgeoisie, the church, and social hypocrisy to create some of the most incendiary films of the twentieth century. Perpetually on the cutting e...
Though her name is now unjustly obscure, Larisa Shepitko was one of the boldest, most renowned filmmakers of the Soviet era. In her tragically short career, the Ukrainian-born auteur left behind only a handful of films—including the psychologically charged feminist character study WINGS and the s...
One of cinema’s freest spirits, Agnès Varda reinvented her approach to film again and again over the course of a decades-long career. Her observant, inquisitive films are suffused with a sense of wonder, exploration, and endless curiosity about the world around her. With her very first feature, t...
New German Cinema renegade Rainer Werner Fassbinder lived fast and made films even faster, directing more than forty features, miniseries, and TV movies before his untimely death at age thirty-seven. With both cutting irony and profound empathy, Fassbinder exposed the moral hypocrisy of German so...
Bristling with a wild, untamed naturalism, the films of British auteur Andrea Arnold are bracing immersions into the worlds of the young, the restless, and the dispossessed. After establishing her bold vision with the wrenching, Academy Award–winning short WASP, Arnold made her feature debut with...
Berlanga didn’t set out to be a rebel, but his subversive cinema earned him a place as one of the greatest Spanish filmmakers of all time. Start with his black-comic masterpiece, THE EXECUTIONER.
Seijun Suzuki’s deliriously inventive approach to filmmaking and his ability to contort genre expectations have influenced filmmakers from John Woo to Quentin Tarantino. We celebrate the life and career of this genuine iconoclast.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, film critics, international festivalgoers, and other studious viewers were swept up by the tide of Italian neorealism. Meanwhile, mainstream Italian audiences were indulging in a different kind of cinema experience: the sensational, extravagant melodramas of dir...
The wry, deadpan seriocomedies of Finland’s most famous director are infused with both a minimalist cool and the wintry, desolate spirit of their frequent setting, Helsinki. Whether surveying the desperate lives of the down-and-out in his bittersweet Proletariat Trilogy (SHADOWS IN PARADISE, ARIE...
The greatest directorial partnership in film history, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger gave a much-needed jolt of expressionistic exuberance to the British cinema. While the quintessentially English Powell and the European sophisticate Pressburger may have made an unlikely duo, their contras...
A director of such distinctive, overpowering vision that he has inspired his own adjective, David Lynch makes films that seem telegraphed straight from his unconscious to the screen. From his early short works—which already display the unsettling surrealist imagery he would unleash in full force ...
The most celebrated Japanese filmmaker of all time, Akira Kurosawa produced a staggering body of work that stands as a monument of artistic achievement. Though best known for samurai epics like SEVEN SAMURAI and YOJIMBO, his intimate, contemporary-set dramas, such as IKIRU and HIGH AND LOW, are j...
A selection of films by France’s answer to Noël Coward, with an introduction by filmmaker Olivier Assayas, who is one of the Gallic raconteur’s biggest fans.
One of film’s greatest geniuses both in front of and behind the camera, Charlie Chaplin was, for a time, the most popular entertainer in the world. From his early slapstick shorts, Chaplin pushed the envelope in developing the art of screen comedy, perfecting it in features like THE KID and THE G...
The multifaceted, deeply personal work of Eric Rohmer had an effect on cinema unlike any other. One of the founding critics of the history-making “Cahiers du cinéma,” Rohmer began translating his written manifestos to film in the 1960s, standing apart from his New Wave contemporaries with his pat...
The films of shockmeister Herschell Gordon Lewis have but one raison d’être: to spill blood, and lots of it. Dubbed the “Godfather of Gore,” Lewis, along with producer David F. Friedman, almost single-handedly gave birth to the splatter-film genre with the 1963 gross-out extravaganza BLOOD FEAST,...
With their blend of earthiness and dreamlike surrealism, the films of Federico Fellini dominated mid-twentieth-century art-house cinema. Though he began his career as a screenwriter for the neorealist titan Roberto Rossellini, Fellini quickly developed his own personal, poetic style in early triu...
Perhaps no filmmaker has shaped the art of contemporary documentary storytelling more than Errol Morris, a director-detective whose portraits of everyday oddballs and cultural icons alike are investigations into the human condition and the elusive nature of truth. Establishing his offbeat vision ...
The son of the great impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir was also a master of his medium: cinema. After making his mark in the early thirties with two very different films, the anarchic send-up of the bourgeoisie BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING and the popular-front Gorky adaptatio...
No director pushed the boundaries of the Czechoslovak New Wave further than Věra Chytilová, an uncompromising individualist whose fiercely antiauthoritarian attitude courses through every frame of her work. Though she remains best known for her feminist touchstone DAISIES—a patriarchy-exploding M...
