“What I mean by realism goes beyond reality,” declared French master Maurice Pialat, whose at once raw and rigorous films capture all the intensity, vivid humanity, brutality, and tenderness of life itself. Born one hundred years ago this August, Pialat was a contemporary of the nouvelle vague, b...

With the passing of Michael Roemer earlier this year, American cinema lost one of its most eloquent voices, a long-unsung independent trailblazer whose profoundly humanist, unfailingly truthful vision had only in recent years come to be properly appreciated. A Jewish refugee who escaped Nazi Germ...

Few filmmakers navigate the libidinal and the lyrical quite like Spanish sensualist Bigas Luna, a provocateur with a painter’s eye, whose films are lush with eroticism, surrealist flourishes, delirium, and grotesquery. His films—including the Iberian Trilogy comprising the international sensation...

This July 15th marks the 100th birthday of documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, who forever changed the way we see the world. He helped pioneer the sync-sound camera rig, allowing his camera to move freely, bringing audiences into the heart of the moments that shaped a century. One of the trai...

Intense, searing visions of life, death, sex, and struggle on the mean streets of Manila, the films of preeminent Filipino auteur Lino Brocka fuse feverish melodrama with hard-hitting social and political commentary. His films—including defining works of Filipino cinema like the gritty urban nigh...

Tackling some of the most urgent questions of our time with a formidable formal and intellectual sophistication, the richly observed documentaries of Brett Story invite us to see, with fresh eyes, the social and political structures that shape our lives. In THE HOTTEST AUGUST, interviews with a w...

Chilling, unblinking confrontations with the void of modern existence, the films of Michael Haneke dare viewers to reckon with the links between media, violence, capitalism, and inequality in an increasingly sterile, alienated world. With his first three theatrical features—THE SEVENTH CONTINENT,...

One of the essential but long-neglected voices of the French New Wave, Jacques Rozier was a comedic master whose small yet rich body of work remains ripe for rediscovery. Starting with his feature debut, ADIEU PHILIPPINE, Rozier was determined to explode conventional story forms, combine seemingl...

With their hypnotic long takes and elliptical narrative structures, the dreamily enveloping films of Taiwanese cinema titan Hou Hsiao-hsien seem to reshape the rules of time, drifting languorously through the ever-changing sociopolitical realities of Taiwan past and present. Beginning his career ...

A playfully subversive trailblazer of African cinema, Niger-born Moustapha Alassane created a charmingly lo-fi, irreverently imaginative world all his own. Featuring cartoon frogs, Wild West–style African cowboys, stop-motion puppets, and folkloric heroes, his often witty, iconoclastic fables tak...

Alan Rudolph’s cinema is a constellation of dreamers, drifters, and disenchanted romantics. A protégé of Robert Altman and a singular voice in independent film, Rudolph has long been a maverick, eschewing convention in favor of elliptical storytelling, painterly compositions, and jazz-inflected r...

Beginning her career as an editor for Martin Scorsese and Hal Ashby, Amy Holden Jones soon proved her own skill as a director with the Roger Corman–produced cult classic THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE, a uniquely sophisticated, subversive take on the slasher genre in which she made brilliantly econom...

A prolific and masterful stylist whose work spans many genres, Hong Kong auteur Johnnie To is most celebrated internationally for his virtuosic action thrillers. Pulsing with kinetic intensity, these movies blend choreographed violence and moral push-and-pull, transforming the heroic-bloodshed ge...

Farce and fantasy, satire and surrealism mingle in the exuberantly imaginative, elegantly witty films of pioneering French director René Clair, one of the most brilliant innovators of cinema’s foundational decades. Clair’s early silent films, like the Dadaist short ENTR’ACTE and the inventive sci...

An intriguing new voice in independent cinema, Korean American filmmaker Ougie Pak combines a strong, atmospheric feeling for place with a nuanced understanding of the subtle shifts in human relationships. Whether training his camera on a woozy New York City as seen through the eyes of a lovelorn...

A true hero of DIY cinema, Jem Cohen has been pursuing his own brand of defiantly independent artistry for more than four decades across films of many shapes and sizes, including city symphonies, collaborations with musicians, artist portraits, and semiscripted features. A poetic chronicler of ur...

Widely recognized for his prolific acting career, Tim Blake Nelson has also pursued an impressive parallel path as a director, often working from his own screenplays. Blending narrative depth and raw emotion, his films vary in style and subject—from the haunting rural tragedy EYE OF GOD (streamin...

Among the greatest filmmakers working today, Chinese master Jia Zhangke is the foremost cinematic chronicler of the vast changes that have transformed his country over the last half century in its transition from communism to a globalized, increasingly market-based society. Beginning his career a...

Gooey, splattery, fleshy nightmares of contagion and transformation, the audacious cinematic transgressions of David Cronenberg—whose latest film, THE SHROUDS, infects theaters this April—are not so much watched as experienced in a visceral, full-body wave of can’t-look-away revulsion and fascina...

One of the most innovative and enigmatic directors of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette approached filmmaking as a kind of choose-your-own-adventure of the imagination, crafting sprawling, immersive works that unfold as labyrinths, games, and puzzles to be deciphered. Blurring the boundaries b...

Specializing in tender, sensitive explorations of queer and Asian identity, writer-director Ray Yeung has carved out a unique place in contemporary Hong Kong cinema to tell intimate stories of gay love finding a way in the face of repression and prejudice. Shot in New York City, FRONT COVER is a ...

Focused on pivotal moments in the lives of women, the films of trailblazing feminist director Joyce Chopra were among the first in American cinema to give authentic expression to the intimate experiences of female adolescence, sexual awakening, and motherhood. Presented in conjunction with the re...

Of all the rebellious talents to emerge from the Japanese New Wave, Masahiro Shinoda (1931–2025) may have been the most versatile and elusive. From his early contributions to the New Wave’s counterculture eruption (YOUTH IN FURY) and his brooding breakout thriller PALE FLOWER to his subsequent pe...

To mark the release of his acclaimed latest, MISERICORDIA, we’re revisiting the daring, dreamlike, darkly comic, and defiantly queer films of director Alain Guiraudie, who has carved out a distinctive place within French cinema through his transgressive explorations of sex, desire, death, and ali...