A fearlessly transgressive, long-overlooked pioneer of feminist cinema, Swedish actor turned director Mai Zetterling ruffled the feathers of the patriarchal establishment with a string of bracingly modern, sexually frank, and politically incendiary films focused on female agency and the turbulent...

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 man who gave the world Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and more, Ishiro Honda was the wizard behind the Japanese monster-movie (kaiju eiga) craze that thrilled legions of international fans in the 1950s and ’60s. Turning the trauma of nuclear attack into larger-than-life pop spectacle, Honda created...

With her breathtaking feature debut, ATLANTICS, French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop has emerged as one of contemporary cinema’s most bracing and distinctive voices. Her singular vision is on full display in her extraordinary short films, intricate, mysterious documentary-fiction hybrid works th...

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...

One of the most revelatory voices to emerge from the postwar explosion of international art-house cinema, Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman was a master storyteller who startled the world with his stark intensity and naked pursuit of the most profound metaphysical and spiritual questions. The struggl...

With her brilliant feature debut, NANNY—winner of the 2022 Sundance Grand Jury Prize—garnering acclaim, now is the perfect time to discover the smartly stylish short films of writer-director Nikyatu Jusu. By turns irreverent, provocative, powerful, and unsettling, these films—all centered on comp...

One of contemporary cinema’s most singular and captivating voices, Jane Campion brings a piercing psychological insight and radiantly expressive visual style to her intense, revelatory explorations of female subjectivity and desire. After winning critical acclaim for her first two theatrical feat...

A lifelong cinephile, François Truffaut first made his mark as a fiery, contentious critic for “Cahiers du cinéma” in the 1950s, denouncing the French film industry’s bloated “tradition of quality” and calling for the director to be redefined as the individual author of their films. It wasn’t lon...

Director, writer, composer, actor, and one-man creative revolutionary Melvin Van Peebles jolted American independent cinema to new life with his explosive stylistic energy and unfiltered expression of Black consciousness. Though he undeniably altered the course of film history with the anarchic S...

Described by Alain Resnais as “the prototype of the twenty-first-century man,” French cine-essayist and multimedia visionary Chris Marker always seemed prophetically ahead of his time—so much so that even now, one hundred years after his birth, his playful, philosophical, and deeply personal rumi...

Portuguese cinematic poet Pedro Costa makes uncompromising, seemingly daunting works that, on the surface, appear rigorously spare. Look closer, however, and they reveal untold depths of human feeling and some of the most sublime images in contemporary cinema. Frequently working with nonprofessio...

Montreal-based filmmaker and multimedia artist Caroline Monnet combines striking, often abstract visuals and evocative soundscapes to explore Indigenous identity, the reverberations of colonialism, and hidden cultural histories. Encompassing an inspiring portrait of a Chippewa mixed martial artis...

No one makes movies like Claire Denis, one of contemporary cinema’s foremost masters. Raised in colonial West Africa, Denis apprenticed as an assistant to Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders before striking out on her own in the late eighties in an entirely original cinematic language shaped by her outs...

With her Academy Award–nominated documentary TIME, Garrett Bradley confirmed her place among the most original and poetic voices working in the realm of nonfiction today. Her richly sensorial visual style and incisive blending of the personal and the political are on display in these remarkable s...

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...

Startling, subversive, and explosively controversial, the films of Ethiopian-born Greek iconoclast Nico Papatakis have long been frustratingly hard to see, but they constitute one of the most radical and neglected bodies of work in all of European cinema. A man of the world who rubbed shoulders w...

Toronto-based filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s intimate, essayistic shorts muse on family, grief, femininity, and humans’ relationships with animals, often with exquisitely touching vulnerability. Deeply personal—she frequently appears in her own films and incorporates her own family’s history and photo...

Maverick director Juzo Itami didn’t direct his first feature—the alternately bawdy and bittersweet satire THE FUNERAL—until the age of fifty, but it announced the arrival of a fully formed sensibility unafraid of skewering the most sensitive aspects of Japanese society. Though his follow-up, the ...

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...

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 founder of the French New Wave who became an international art-house icon, Agnès Varda was a fiercely independent, restlessly curious visionary whose work was at once personal and passionately committed to the world around her. In an abundant career in which she never stopped expanding the noti...

Though Michelangelo Antonioni worked throughout the forties (on short documentaries like N.U., about street cleaners in Rome) and fifties (directing his first fiction features, including the penetrating study of bourgeois Italian life LE AMICHE), it was in the 1960s that he became a major force i...

One of the most acclaimed Japanese directors of all time, Hiroshi Teshigahara distinguished himself in the 1960s with a series of sinuous, atmospheric, and daring films. With enigmatic art-house touchstones like the existential ghost story PITFALL, the shocking erotic fable WOMAN IN THE DUNES, an...