Directors

Directors

Share
Directors
  • Directed by Jean Eustache

    1 season

    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 ...

  • Directed by Makoto Shinkai

    1 season

    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...

  • Directed by William Friedkin

    1 season

    One of the brashest auteurs to emerge from the New American Cinema, William Friedkin jolted new life into some of Hollywood’s most popular genres—from crime thriller to horror to action—with a gritty, documentary-like immediacy and a fearless approach to controversial subjects. While early triump...

  • Directed by Shirley Clarke

    1 season

    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’...

  • Directed by James Gray

    1 season

    James Gray has always stayed true to himself and to his roots in Queens, New York, drawing on his family’s immigrant background to lend a multilayered authenticity to his rich, empathetic dramas steeped in the city’s cultural melting pot. This collection—including his intense crime-drama debut LI...

  • Directed by Ken Russell

    1 season

    Passionate, transgressive, over-the-top, and unforgettable: the films of British iconoclast Ken Russell have rarely been surpassed in their feverish visual imagination and sheer audaciousness. Courting controversy after controversy with provocations like THE DEVILS, MAHLER, and ALTERED STATES, Ru...

  • Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

    1 season

    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...

  • Directed by Yasujiro Ozu

    1 season

    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 ...

  • Directed by Wong Kar Wai

    1 season

    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...

  • Directed by Ousmane Sembène

    1 season

    “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...

  • Directed by Mark Lewis

    1 season

    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 ...

  • Directed by Robert Bresson

    1 season

    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...

  • Directed by Hal Hartley

    1 season

    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...

  • Directed by Stanley Kwan

    1 season

    The exquisitely stylized, richly emotional films of Hong Kong New Wave auteur Stanley Kwan employ the conventions of melodrama with a rare sensitivity and sincerity. Empathetically attuned to the longings and struggles of women, his masterpieces—the sumptuous ghost story ROUGE and the kaleidoscop...

  • Directed by Roberto Rossellini

    1 season

    A founder of Italian neorealism, Roberto Rossellini brought to filmmaking a documentary-like authenticity and philosophical stringency that changed the course of film history. Rossellini broke out with ROME OPEN CITY, a shattering and vivid chronicle of the Nazi occupation of Italy’s capital, fol...

  • Directed by Seijun Suzuki

    1 season

    Born one hundred years ago this month, Japanese New Wave renegade Seijun Suzuki combined a deliriously inventive approach to filmmaking and a fast-and-loose attitude toward genre expectations to make some of the most thrillingly stylish movies of all time, frequently transcending narrative logic ...

  • Directed by David Lynch

    2 seasons

    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. Now streaming for the first time, Lynch’s newly restored masterpieces LOST HIGHWAY and INLAND EMPIRE, as well as a...

  • Short Films by Fanta Régina Nacro

    1 season

    The first woman from Burkina Faso to direct a narrative film, Fanta Régina Nacro addresses complex social issues with a gently subversive, lightly comic touch. Tackling everything from AIDS and sexual health to gender roles and relations to the evolving place of tradition within the modern world,...

  • Abbas Kiarostami’s Childhood Films

    1 season

    Long before he became one of the most renowned artists in world cinema, the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami began his cinematic career at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (a.k.a. Kanoon) in Tehran, where he honed his distinctive style and themes and...

  • Mike Leigh at the BBC

    1 season

    In the seventeen years between his first two theatrical features (1971’s BLEAK MOMENTS and 1988’s HIGH HOPES), Mike Leigh, the great humanist of British cinema, sharpened his distinctive voice and famously improvisatory process at the BBC, where he directed a string of striking, bittersweet slice...

  • Márta Mészáros’s Diary Trilogy

    1 season

    With her extraordinary Diary Trilogy, trailblazing Hungarian auteur Márta Mészáros fused the personal and the political, entwining her country’s turbulent post–World War II history with a heartrending story drawn from her own life experiences. Tracing the journey of a strong-willed orphan named J...

  • Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

    2 seasons

    At the vanguard of international filmmaking for six decades, French New Wave titan Jean-Luc Godard exerted an incalculable influence on modern cinema that refuses to wane. With his groundbreaking 1960 debut feature, BREATHLESS, Godard merged elements of high and low culture with an anything-goes ...

  • Short Films by Faith and John Hubley

    1 season

    A pair of Hollywood exiles—she was a former script clerk at Columbia, he was an ex–Disney cartoonist and union activist blacklisted for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee—Faith and John Hubley left behind the mainstream to forge a thrillingly experimental ani...

  • Directed by Carlos Saura

    1 season

    Reality and fantasy, dreams and memories flow freely into one another in the haunting, layered works of iconoclastic auteur Carlos Saura, arguably the most important Spanish filmmaker to emerge between Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar. Achieving international renown during the repressive years of ...