Directed by Mary Harron • 2000 • United States, Canada
Starring Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto

With an iconically unhinged performance from Christian Bale and an audacious blend of grisly violence and subversive black comedy, director Mary Harron turned Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious be...

Directed by Preston Sturges • 1942 • United States
Starring Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Mary Astor

This wild tale of wacky wedlock from Preston Sturges takes off like a rocket and never lets up. Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert play Tom and Gerry, a married New York couple on the skids, fin...

Directed by Tom Tykwer • 2006 • Germany, France, Spain
Starring Ben Whishaw, Alan Rickman, Rachel Hurd-Wood

Tom Tykwer (RUN LOLA RUN) directs this ravishingly stylized adaptation of Patrick Süskind’s best-selling novel, set in an intoxicating vision of eighteenth-century France where Jean-Baptis...

Directed by David Cronenberg • 2014 • Canada, United States, France
Starring Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattinson

Director David Cronenberg’s corrosive portrait of Hollywood as a soul-sucking, sunblasted wasteland stars Julianne Moore (in a deliriously unhinged performance for which ...

Directed by Kasi Lemmons • 1997 • United States
Starring Jurnee Smollett, Meagan Good, Samuel L. Jackson

“The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old . . .” So begins Kasi Lemmons’s spellbinding feature debut, an evocative journey into the maze of memory steeped in fragrant southern-gothi...

Directed by George Miller • 1981 • Australia
Starring Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Michael Preston

George Miller’s acclaimed sequel to his postapocalyptic action classic MAD MAX delivers even more audacious, adrenaline-rush mayhem. Mel Gibson returns in the role that made him an international super...

Directed by Uli Edel • 1993 • Germany, United States
Starring Madonna, Willem Dafoe, Julianne Moore

Madonna’s answer to BASIC INSTINCT, this ultrakinky erotic thriller stars the pop icon as Rebecca Carlson, a powerful woman who exerts an irresistible sexual control over the men in her orbit. But...

Directed by Elaine May • 1971 • United States
Starring Walter Matthau, Elaine May, Jack Weston

The brilliance of Elaine May is on full display in her directorial debut, a deliciously deadpan black-comic jewel that stands as one of the finest and funniest films of the 1970s. She stars as the ende...

Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz • 1959 • United States, United Kingdom
Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift

Gay panic, incest, and a sprinkling of cannibalism: Tennessee Williams’s one-act southern-gothic shocker gets an appropriately lurid screen adaptation cowritten ...

Directed by Albert Brooks • 1985 • United States
Starring Albert Brooks, Julie Hagerty

In this hysterical satire of Reagan-era values, written and directed by Albert Brooks, a successful Los Angeles advertising executive (Brooks) and his wife (Julie Hagerty) decide to quit their jobs, buy a Winn...

Directed by William A. Wellman • 1937 • United States
Starring Janet Gaynor, Fredric March, Adolphe Menjou

The second version (after 1932’s WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD?) of this iconic, oft-filmed showbiz fable remains one of the best thanks to its lavish Technicolor production values and impactful dir...

Directed by Paul Verhoeven • 2021 • France, Netherlands, Belgium
Starring Virginie Efira, Charlotte Rampling, Daphné Patakia

The ever-provocative Paul Verhoeven brings his subversive vision to a seventeenth-century convent for this ecstatically blasphemous tale of religion, sex, scandal, and pla...

Directed by Todd Haynes • 1995 • United States
Starring Julianne Moore, Peter Friedman, Xander Berkeley

Julianne Moore gives a breakthrough performance as Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late 1980s who comes down with a debilitating illness. After the doctors she sees can give her no...

Directed by Pratibha Parmar • 1991 • United States
Starring Angela Davis, Alice Walker, June Jordan

Featuring enlightening interviews with Angela Davis, June Jordan, and Alice Walker, this essential documentary is an exuberant celebration of Black American women and their achievements. Within th...

Directed by Ornella Pacchioni • 2021 • France

Thirteen-year-old Lucie is alone during the summer holidays when she meets a mysterious boy named Léo. Though she sees him as a remedy for her loneliness, strange events come to pass as they spend time together.

Directed by Louis Malle • 1994 • United States
Starring André Gregory, Wallace Shawn, Julianne Moore

In the early nineties, theater director André Gregory mounted a series of spare, private performances of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” in a crumbling Manhattan playhouse. This experiment in pure ...

Directed by Peter Sykes • 1976 • United Kingdom, West Germany, United States
Starring Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee, Nastassja Kinski

The final horror film released by legendary British studio Hammer Films until its revival in the 2000s, this adaptation of a novel by occult specialist Dennis ...

Directed by John Woo • 1997 • United States
Starring Nicolas Cage, John Travolta, Joan Allen

John Travolta plays Nicolas Cage, Nicolas Cage plays John Travolta, and master of turbocharged action spectacle John Woo detonates the screen in what may be the most utterly berserk blockbuster of the 19...

Directed by Robert Altman • 2003 • United States
Starring Neve Campbell, Malcolm McDowell, James Franco

Robert Altman applies his ever-expansive vision to the intricate inner workings of a ballet company in this almost documentary-like backstage saga. Made in collaboration with Chicago’s renowne...

Directed by Yugantar • 1983 • India

The Yugantar Film Collective’s most successful and widely seen film sheds light on the issue of domestic violence in Indian society. Created in collaboration with the feminist activist collective Stree Shakhti Sanghatana, this short, improvised narrative film ...

Directed by Stephen Daldry • 2002 • United States
Starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep

The powerhouse trio of Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman deliver masterful performances in Stephen Daldry’s exquisitely multilayered adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Pr...

Directed by Yugantar • 1981 • India

This portrait of female solidarity in action exposes the oppressive working conditions of hundreds of maidservants in Pune, India, and reveals how the women came together to form an organization to fight for their rights.

Directed by Deepa Dhanraj • 1991 • India

SOMETHING LIKE A WAR is a chilling examination of India’s family-planning program from the point of view of the women who are its primary targets. It traces the history of the family-planning program and exposes the cynicism, corruption, and brutality of ...

Directed by Deepa Dhanraj • 2011 • India

In Southern India, many family disputes are settled by Jamaats—all-male bodies that apply Islamic Sharia law to cases without allowing women to be present, even to defend themselves. Recognizing this fundamental inequity, a group of women in 2004 establis...