Simmering with outrage and biting irony, the slashingly subversive films of French-Martinican writer-director Julius-Amédée Laou carry on the legacy of his compatriot Frantz Fanon, giving blistering expression to the experience of postcolonial systemic racism in France. Though he is most famous a...

To mark the release of his acclaimed new drama HIS THREE DAUGHTERS, we’re revisiting the films of Azazel Jacobs, who has been quietly crafting some of the funniest, tenderest, and most winningly offbeat works in the last two decades of American independent cinema. Poignant stories of outsiders an...

The great cinematic mythmaker of the San Fernando Valley, Paul Thomas Anderson stages uniquely American tales of ambition, destiny, downfall, and redemption on an epic scale. Full of bold camera movement, expressive compositions, and attention-grabbing music, and featuring showstopping performanc...

From capitalism to patriotism to politics to marriage, there was virtually no pillar of American life that escaped unscathed during screwball auteur Preston Sturges’s whirlwind heyday in the 1940s. One of the first Hollywood filmmakers to direct his own scripts (a deal he negotiated by selling hi...

The rhythms, rituals, and richness of life in rural Mexico come into revelatory focus in the meditative, exquisitely observed films of Juan Pablo González. Turning his ever-patient camera on the people and landscapes of his hometown in the state of Jalisco, González works across documentary and n...

For more than half a century, Youssef Chahine drew from the multicultural, cosmopolitan spirit of his home city of Alexandria to forge a passionate, extravagant, iconoclastic oeuvre that merged a quintessentially Egyptian sensibility with international influences ranging from Hollywood musicals a...

In this new program, critic Imogen Sara Smith introduces one of Japanese cinema’s classical masters—a virtuoso of melodrama who specialized in portraying the personal and social struggles of women with supreme sensitivity. In a career that spanned four decades, he directed nearly ninety films, in...

The thrillingly innovative films of Nicolas Roeg are dazzling, chronology-scrambling puzzles that explode the rules of cinema and leave the viewer to piece together the shards. Distinguishing himself first as a cinematographer for directors such as François Truffaut and Roger Corman, Roeg made th...

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ability to simultaneously embrace conflicting philosophies—he drew from Marxism and Catholicism; and he lived a thoroughly modern, openly gay life while looking to the distant past for inspiration and comfort—was matched by the multifariousness of his artistic output as a fi...

Now ninety-six years old, director Michael Roemer was always ahead of his time—and at last, after decades of neglect, the world is catching up to his profoundly humanist, unfailingly truthful vision. A Jewish refugee who escaped Nazi Germany as a child, Roemer has made only a handful of features,...

Working across narrative, documentary, animation, experimental, and interactive cinema, Ayoka Chenzira brings the inner worlds of Black women—their hopes, dreams, anxieties, and struggles—to life with heart, humor, and insight. An all-around creative force, she made her mark as an animator with a...

The language of cinema is limitless in the ecstatically inspired universe of Japanese avant-pop visionary Nobuhiko Obayashi, who gleefully bridged the experimental and the mainstream over the course of a wildly prolific career. From his debut feature—the eyeball-zapping cult-horror freakout HOUSE...

Everyday reality slips into surrealist reverie in the uncanny visions of Sara Driver, whose films possess the hallucinatory textures and hypnotic rhythms of a waking dream. A central but often overlooked linchpin of the 1980s downtown New York arts scene, Driver made her directorial debut with YO...

One of the most revered yet enigmatic figures to emerge in the wake of the French New Wave, Jean Eustache left behind a handful of unsentimental yet compassionate films that continue to be rediscovered and embraced by new generations of cinephiles. With a string of early shorts, he developed the ...

Like his predecessor Hayao Miyazaki, to whom he is often compared, Makoto Shinkai has taken anime to new heights of pure cinematic achievement. Specially attuned to the loneliness of young people living in digitally saturated urban environments, he depicts their longing and need—no matter how imp...

Experimental icon Shirley Clarke synthesized jazz, modern dance, and abstract expressionism into a dynamic vérité style that put her at the forefront of the emergent American independent film scene of the fifties and sixties. Beginning her artistic career as a dancer, she brought a choreographer’...

For five decades, Alfred Hitchcock explored our innermost anxieties, desires, and obsessions in his diabolically constructed thrillers, which redefined the mechanics of screen terror through meticulous editing, voyeuristic camera work, and unforgettable set pieces. In endlessly studied and imitat...

Yasujiro Ozu was Japanese cinema’s great poet of everyday life, and, 120 years after his birth, he remains one of the most significant film artists who ever lived. From the late 1920s to the early ’60s, Ozu explored the rhythms and tensions of a country trying to reconcile modern and traditional ...

With his lush and sensual visuals, pitch-perfect soundtracks, and soulful romanticism, Wong Kar Wai has established himself as one of the defining auteurs of contemporary cinema. Joined by such key collaborators as cinematographer Christopher Doyle; editor and production and costume designer Will...

“If Africans do not tell their own stories, Africa will soon disappear,” declared Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese cinematic revolutionary whose career-long project to illuminate the lives of the marginalized made him the continent’s most influential and widely acclaimed director. A manual laborer...

Mark Lewis makes nature films like you’ve never seen before. In their strangeness, all the sublimity, absurdity, and incomprehensibility of the animal world—especially where it intersects with human society—comes into fascinating and wryly humorous focus. It’s little wonder that Werner Herzog is ...

A singular, iconoclastic artist, Robert Bresson left behind an astonishing body of work, defined by the search for what he called “not beautiful images, but necessary images.” In a long, visionary career that began in the 1940s and ended in the 1980s, he continually refined the strict precision o...

Hal Hartley is a true independent, boasting one of the most idiosyncratic bodies of work in all of contemporary cinema. First emerging in the late 1980s and early ’90s with a fully formed sensibility on display in the barbed romantic comedies THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH and TRUST, he quickly became on...