In the 1990s, underground music—from punk and hip-hop to indie rock and electronica—exploded into the pop-culture consciousness through some of the defining films of the era. Movies like PUMP UP THE VOLUME didn’t just capture the social and aesthetic codes of disaffected Gen Xers; they also deliv...

A one-of-a-kind performer, choreographer, and director, Hong Kong superstar Sammo Hung reinvented action cinema as a space of exuberant physicality and unexpected grace. Trained at the same Beijing-opera academy as Jackie Chan (with whom he costarred in films like MY LUCKY STARS), Hung deployed t...

“What I mean by realism goes beyond reality,” declared French master Maurice Pialat, whose at once raw and rigorous films capture all the intensity, vivid humanity, brutality, and tenderness of life itself. Born one hundred years ago this August, Pialat was a contemporary of the nouvelle vague, b...

Few filmmakers navigate the libidinal and the lyrical quite like Spanish sensualist Bigas Luna, a provocateur with a painter’s eye, whose films are lush with eroticism, surrealist flourishes, delirium, and grotesquery. His films—including the Iberian Trilogy comprising the international sensation...

Among the greatest filmmakers working today, Chinese master Jia Zhangke is the foremost cinematic chronicler of the vast changes that have transformed his country over the last half century in its transition from communism to a globalized, increasingly market-based society. Beginning his career a...

Wicked charmer, sociopath, con artist, and killer, Tom Ripley is one of literature and cinema’s most enduring and enigmatic antiheroes. The slippery and seductive schemer at the center of Patricia Highsmith’s celebrated series of crime novels, Ripley has captivated filmmakers across generations, ...

Take a dip in some of cinema’s most memorable swimming pools—those uncanny, aqueous environs where interior collides with exterior, the private flirts with the public, and time seems suspended above the watermark. Serving variously as sites of adolescent sexual awakening in coming-of-age portrait...