Two films scale the ivory tower to explore the posturing and politics of academic life. First, a pair of father-and-son professors find themselves rivals in the cloistered field of Talmudic studies in Joseph Cedar’s piercing and darkly funny Israeli drama FOOTNOTE. It’s paired with the film that ...
Formally innovative and wildly entertaining documentaries tell the fascinating behind-the-scenes stories of two films that were never made. Forty years after he was forced to abandon a Brazilian jungle adventure that was to star John Wayne, Ava Gardner, and Tyrone Power, Hollywood maverick Samuel...
A torrid Technicolor romance and a tour de force of cinematic realism explore the violent, passionate world of bullfighting and the thrilling, dangerous lives of matadors. One of the most visually stunning films ever made, Rouben Mamoulian’s BLOOD AND SAND casts Tyrone Power as a dashing torero w...
The same blood runs through these decade-defining, persona-swapping chamber dramas starring two rock icons. Identities and genres collide in Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s aesthetically daring PERFORMANCE, an enduring cult favorite that fuses the British gangster picture with the 1960s London ...
Mary Shelley’s fabled monster unleashes mayhem in a Universal horror classic and its wickedly witty sequel. With the original 1931 FRANKENSTEIN, director James Whale and Boris Karloff created one of cinema’s most enduring movie monsters, a creature both fearsome and oddly touching, whose tragic j...
In 1958, one of the most unforgettable movie monsters in cinema history oozed its way onto the screen and straight into drive-in immortality in the form of THE BLOB, a B-movie cult classic of gooey greatness starring Steve McQueen in one of his earliest roles. Thirty years later, the gelatinous t...
The ultimate vampire classic is paired with a subversive blaxploitation update in this twice-bitten double feature. With the ultra-influential 1931 adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel “Dracula,” director Tod Browning and star Bela Lugosi established the archetype of the modern vampire: suave, sop...
This October marks the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Barbara Bel Geddes, a feisty and perpetually underrated presence who here shines in a pair of atmospheric noir classics. First, Bel Geddes is the wife of a devoted New Orleans doctor (played by Richard Widmark) who must turn detecti...
In this pair of acclaimed literary adaptations by master filmmakers attuned to women’s lives and social pressures, two women find their staid marriages upended by the arrival of an outsider to their homes. First, the great Satyajit Ray conjures a ravishing vision of nineteenth-century Kolkata in ...
The complexities and evolution of women’s friendships over time are explored with a humanist touch and playful approach to structure by Jane Campion and Mike Leigh. Campion first found acclaim with the humorous and fiercely honest TWO FRIENDS, in which she works backward through time to trace the...
In his dazzling period delight TOPSY-TURVY, Mike Leigh brings the colorful world of Gilbert and Sullivan to life, charting the legendary nineteenth-century theatrical team’s uphill battle to mount a major production. The show in question—the now world-famous comic opera “The Mikado”—was brought t...
Monks, mystery, and brooding gothic atmosphere abound in two monastery-set works of expressionist horror from the dawn of Mexican cinema’s golden age. A haunted cloister awash in chiaroscuro shadows is the setting for the macabre thriller THE PHANTOM OF THE MONASTERY, an early triumph from Fernan...
Thematic connections reveal themselves in two delicately balanced triptychs featuring seemingly unrelated characters. DRIVE MY CAR director Ryusuke Hamaguchi spins chance encounters into worlds of infinite possibility in WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY, comprised of three surprising, exquisitely bit...
Two luminous black-and-white road trips—one associate-produced by Wim Wenders, the other directed by him—trace aimless existential journeys across Britain, Europe, and America in the 1970s. Shot in cool monochrome by Wenders’s camera operator Martin Schäfer, Christopher Petit’s British cult class...
The magnetic Maggie Cheung lights up the screen in two mesmerizing metatextual works that deconstruct the nature of stardom. In Hong Kong New Wave master Stanley Kwan’s lush, kaleidoscopic biopic CENTER STAGE, Cheung embodies ill-fated screen siren Ruan Lingyu, who rose to fame as the “Greta Garb...
Something sinister simmers beneath the summer sun when Alain Delon gets mixed up in murder in a pair of sultry, Mediterranean-set thrillers. The French actor with the steely blue gaze was at his most impossibly beautiful when he got his star-making breakthrough playing duplicitous charmer Tom Rip...
The hit-man thriller gets a shot of postmodern cool in a pair of stylish crime dramas built around solitary, Zen heroes. A razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and Japanese lone-warrior mythology, Jean‑Pierre Melville’s LE SAMOURAÏ features a career-defining performance from Ala...
An undead classic of German expressionist terror lives on in a spellbinding remake from contemporary cinema’s gutsiest iconoclast. An unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s DRACULA, F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent landmark NOSFERATU features arguably the creepiest vampire in cinema history in the fo...
Master directors Wim Wenders and Joseph Losey paint sinister portraits of moral corruption in a pair of spellbinding, coolly stylized tales of unscrupulous art dealers embroiled in dangerous underworlds. Wenders’ gripping Patricia Highsmith adaptation THE AMERICAN FRIEND casts Dennis Hopper as th...
Kathleen Collins’s independent landmark LOSING GROUND is a luminous, brilliantly perceptive portrait of a marriage at a crossroads and a woman’s emotional awakening. One of the first films to explore black female desire with nuance and philosophical complexity, it contains a key allusion to actre...
Jean Renoir and Akira Kurosawa, two of cinema’s greatest directors, transform Maxim Gorky’s classic proletariat play “The Lower Depths” in their own ways for their own times. Renoir, working alongside the Popular Front in France while Hitler rose in Germany, took license with the dark nature of G...
Samuel Fuller and Orson Welles bring a mischievous sleight of hand to these slippery accounts of some of history’s most notorious scammers, cheats, and cons. Based on a stranger-than-fiction true story, Fuller’s offbeat western-noir gem THE BARON OF ARIZONA stars Vincent Price at his unctuous bes...
With his 1948 HAMLET, director-star Laurence Olivier created what remains the definitive screen version of the Bard’s venerable drama, a vividly cinematic, psychologically charged interpretation that garnered Oscars for both best picture and best actor. Less likely to win any awards is the hilari...
Jacques Demy’s candy-colored, enchantingly romantic musical THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG may not seem like an obvious pairing with a fast-and-furious swordplay spectacular filled with glinting blades and bloody vengeance. Nevertheless, LAST HURRAH FOR CHIVALRY’s director, John Woo, counts the swoon...
