The Pulitzer Prize–winning author on a lifetime of moviegoing

Directed by Roberto Rossellini • 1950 • Italy, United States

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 island. After World War II, a Lithuanian...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1956 • France

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 complicated relationship between a married cou...

Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1961 • Sweden

While vacationing on a remote island retreat, a family's already fragile ties are tested when daughter Karin (Harriet Andersson) discovers her father has been using her schizophrenia for his own literary means. As she drifts in and out of lucidity, the ...

Directed by Satyajit Ray • 1963 • India

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 the initial protests of her bank-clerk husband, to take a j...

Directed by Ritwik Ghatak • 1973 • Bangladesh

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 Bengal. Focusing on the tragic intertwining fates of a ser...

Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • Belgium

A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman's JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELL meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner ...