The Pulitzer Prize–winning author on a lifetime of moviegoing

Directed by Roberto Rossellini • 1950 • Italy, United States
Starring Ingrid Bergman, Mario Vitale

The first collaboration between Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman is a devastating portrait of a woman’s existential crisis, set against the beautiful and forbidding backdrop of a volcanic isla...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1955 • France
Starring Silvia Monfort, Philippe Noiret

The great Agnès Varda’s film career began with this graceful, penetrating study of a marriage on the rocks, set against the backdrop of a small Mediterranean fishing village. Both a stylized depiction of the complic...

Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1961 • Sweden
Starring Harriet Andersson, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand

While vacationing on a remote island retreat, a family finds its fragile ties tested when daughter Karin (an astonishing Harriet Andersson) discovers her father (Gunnar Björnstrand) has been ...

Directed by Satyajit Ray • 1963 • India
Starring Madhabi Mukherjee, Anil Chatterjee, Jaya Bhaduri

THE BIG CITY, the great Satyajit Ray’s first portrayal of contemporary life in his native Kolkata, follows the personal triumphs and frustrations of Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee), who decides, despite t...

Directed by Ritwik Ghatak • 1973 • Bangladesh
Starring Kabari Choudhury, Roushan Jamil, Prabir Mitra

The Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s stunningly beautiful, elegiac saga concerns the tumultuous lives of people in fishing villages along the banks of the Titas River in pre-Partition East Benga...

Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • Belgium
Starring Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte

A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores ...