Raw, gritty, intensely angry visions of individuals pushed to the brink by a corrupt society, the films of Hong Kong action renegade Ringo Lam scorch the screen with an anarchic fury. His action classic CITY ON FIRE offered Chow Yun-fat one of his meatiest roles and inspired Quentin Tarantino’s R...

Emerging from the creative rebellion of the New Queer Cinema movement, Todd Haynes has remained one of American independent cinema’s most daring and subversive voices, a master stylist who uses his command of the language of classic melodrama to reveal the hidden fears, anxieties, and hypocrisies...

With six features—including his acclaimed latest, SENTIMENTAL VALUE—to his name, Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier has established himself as one of the most virtuosic directors working today, a humanist who brings novelistic depth and insight to his intimate portraits of people grappling with every...

With her landmark debut feature WILL, pioneering cameraperson turned filmmaker (and all-around Renaissance woman) Jessie Maple became one of the first Black American women to direct an independent feature film, bringing unflinching honesty and stirring emotion to an endearingly tough and tender p...

On the occasion of the theatrical release of his highly anticipated third feature RESURRECTION, journey into the mesmerizing world of Bi Gan, the Chinese auteur whose labyrinthine, dreamlike narratives and immersive, mind-bogglingly epic long takes have rapidly established him as one of contempor...

As his unmissable television epic BLOSSOMS SHANGHAI comes to the Criterion Channel, immerse yourself in the woozy world of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai, whose lush visuals, swooning soundtracks, and wistful romanticism have made him one of contemporary cinema’s defining artists. Working with key...

Among the politically committed African filmmakers who emerged in the postcolonial era, Mauritanian-French firebrand Med Hondo stood as one of the boldest and most provocative voices, forging a fiercely experimental style all his own to examine the historical toll of colonial oppression on genera...

Graced with warmth, sensitivity, and indelible, richly realized characters, the films of Nancy Savoca eloquently evoke the inner worlds of women who challenge patriarchal norms in their quests to define themselves. Both built around luminous performances from Lili Taylor as young women on complex...

As his Palme d’Or–winning latest IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT comes to theaters this fall, revisit the vital, self-reflexive, slyly perceptive films of the brilliant Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi, whose every work is an act of resistance. In his first two films, the neorealist revelations THE WHITE BALL...

An artistic renegade every bit as uncompromising, fearless, and eccentric as the outsiders, oddballs, and obsessives he makes films about, Werner Herzog is a larger-than-life legend who has risked death, hypnotized an entire cast, moved a steamship over a mountain, and eaten his own shoe, all in ...

A living legend of Indian cinema, Adoor Gopalakrishnan is a major auteur whose psychologically penetrating films often take the form of parables or enigmas exploring the relationship between the individual and society—in particular the conditions of life in his home state of Kerala. Taking inspir...

Both a consummate popular entertainer and an auteur so distinctive he inspired his own adjective, Howard Hawks built his movies around an exuberant, loose-limbed spirit of collaboration and improvisation, driven by the sparky banter and freewheeling interplay of charismatic stars at their best. I...

Fiercely independent voices in American cinema, Rob Nilsson and John Hanson make films that capture the grit and resistance of ordinary Americans on the front lines of class struggle. Through their groundbreaking dramatic feature NORTHERN LIGHTS and the revelatory documentary shorts known as the ...

A true trailblazer of independent cinema, Charles Burnett has brought images of Black American life to the screen with authenticity, empathy, and stirring poetry. Bringing together landmarks like KILLER OF SHEEP and TO SLEEP WITH ANGER, lesser-known gems such as THE GLASS SHIELD and THE ANNIHILAT...

Few filmmakers have forged a voice as singular and uncategorizable as that of Ukrainian iconoclast Kira Muratova. Working on the margins of Soviet and post-Soviet cinema, she withstood decades of censorship to realize her uncompromising vision in fascinatingly fragmented, expressionistically heig...

A master of cinematic spectacle whose genre-bending films incorporate sumptuous period detail, exhilarating fantasy, martial-arts mayhem, and theatrical artifice, Hong Kong cinema titan Tsui Hark dazzles viewers with his colorful, richly imagined worlds drawn from myth and legend. Whether blendin...

Dreamlike, hauntingly atmospheric visions of sex, blood, and existential ennui, the poetic-erotic fantasies of French art-horror master Jean Rollin exist on a hypnotic wavelength all their own. Frequently employing the figure of the female, often lesbian, vampire as a vessel for Rollin’s symbol-l...

The complex dynamics between mothers and daughters is at the heart of these beautifully understated shorts by Colombian director Sofía Camargo. In BY THE RIVER, an unspoken grief hovers in the household of a newly single mother and her two daughters, while in NOSTOS, a young girl acts out in defi...

Edward Yang made films on a monumental scale, bringing novelistic depth to sprawling stories of human connection, alienation, and self-discovery set in a rapidly changing Taiwan. Capturing intricate webs of criss-crossing social relationships with his masterful long takes, Yang’s films—including ...

Tantalizingly surreal, dreamily erotic, and wickedly subversive, the films of Polish provocateur Walerian Borowczyk are symbol-laden existential reveries rendered in painterly soft focus. Made in the midst of his most notorious period, the grief-suffused psychosexual drama LA MARGE and the blasph...

One of the most exciting emerging voices in African cinema, Congolese French filmmaker Alain Kassanda makes immersive, thought-provoking documentaries that connect the lived experiences of everyday people to larger social and political questions. Turning his observant camera on both his grandpare...

“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...