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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...