A prolific and masterful stylist whose work spans many genres, Hong Kong auteur Johnnie To is most celebrated internationally for his virtuosic action thrillers. Pulsing with kinetic intensity, these movies blend choreographed violence and moral push-and-pull, transforming the heroic-bloodshed ge...

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...

Beginning her career as an editor for Martin Scorsese and Hal Ashby, Amy Holden Jones soon proved her own skill as a director with the Roger Corman–produced cult classic THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE, a uniquely sophisticated, subversive take on the slasher genre in which she made brilliantly econom...

Perhaps no actor embodied the pervasive anxiety and unsettling moral ambiguity of the New Hollywood era as fully as Gene Hackman. With his nuanced, unfailingly realistic approach to acting, Hackman brought a moody intensity to defining films of the 1970s like THE FRENCH CONNECTION and NIGHT MOVES...

Packed with delectable feasts of divine food, glorious international locales, and uproarious comic interplay, the THE TRIP series—appearing here in both its complete original television presentation and its theatrical cuts—follows live-wire improvisational geniuses Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as ...

Alan Rudolph’s cinema is a constellation of dreamers, drifters, and disenchanted romantics. A protégé of Robert Altman and a singular voice in independent film, Rudolph has long been a maverick, eschewing convention in favor of elliptical storytelling, painterly compositions, and jazz-inflected r...

Coming-of-age films reflect the emotional experience of queerness better than any other kind. Buffeted by waves of adolescent desire and the contortions of self-identification, they often defy convention and category. Selected by series curator Michael Koresky and special guest Jane Schoenbrun (d...

An intriguing new voice in independent cinema, Korean American filmmaker Ougie Pak combines a strong, atmospheric feeling for place with a nuanced understanding of the subtle shifts in human relationships. Whether training his camera on a woozy New York City as seen through the eyes of a lovelorn...

Farce and fantasy, satire and surrealism mingle in the exuberantly imaginative, elegantly witty films of pioneering French director René Clair, one of the most brilliant innovators of cinema’s foundational decades. Clair’s early silent films, like the Dadaist short ENTR’ACTE and the inventive sci...

With its cynical worldview and sympathy for doomed outsiders, it’s no wonder that film noir ran afoul of the Hollywood blacklist. Beginning in the 1940s, many left-leaning filmmakers found in noir the perfect vehicle for challenging the dream factory’s sunny view of American society. Campaigns li...

Kathryn Bigelow’s early films are bracing fusions of kinetic genre thrills and potent social critique, probing cultural anxieties and questions of identity with style and intelligence to burn. THE LOVELESS, her assured directorial debut, is a reinvention of the road movie, blending existential de...

Sun-dappled waves and swirling ocean depths reflect psychological turmoil in these moodily atmospheric tales of seaside suspense set against rugged shorelines and restless waters. In the interplay between location and plot, films like OUT OF THE FOG and THE GHOST WRITER exploit the sense of isola...

Writer, satirist, “pornographer,” surrealist, and provocateur, Terry Southern was one of the great literary minds of his time. As a screenwriter, he brought his irreverent, gonzo sensibility to some of the defining counterculture films of the 1960s. Invited by Stanley Kubrick to assist on the scr...

Throughout her multifaceted career, Joan Chen has continually proven herself a master of her craft, effortlessly spanning cultures and bridging worlds. First discovered in her teens in China during the seventies, she broke through to international audiences with her performance in Bernardo Bertol...

A true hero of DIY cinema, Jem Cohen has been pursuing his own brand of defiantly independent artistry for more than four decades across films of many shapes and sizes, including city symphonies, collaborations with musicians, artist portraits, and semiscripted features. A poetic chronicler of ur...

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...

Spotlighting the role of women in Arab revolutionary movements, the extraordinary films of Lebanese director Heiny Srour are long overdue for rediscovery. For THE HOUR OF LIBERATION HAS ARRIVED, Srour weathered the dangers of an active conflict zone to document an Omani anticolonialist uprising i...

Widely recognized for his prolific acting career, Tim Blake Nelson has also pursued an impressive parallel path as a director, often working from his own screenplays. Blending narrative depth and raw emotion, his films vary in style and subject—from the haunting rural tragedy EYE OF GOD (streamin...

Always bold, subversive, and razor-sharp, auteur and cultural icon Spike Lee sees the complexities of life in America with a clarity like no other. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, he sits down with Sheril Antonio, his colleague at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, to disc...

A magnetic screen presence who brings passionate intensity and fearless emotional depth to her numerous acclaimed performances, Penélope Cruz has been a major force in both Spanish and American cinema for more than three decades. In this, her birthday month of April, we revisit a selection of car...

On the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, filmmaker and program curator Tony Bui presents a multiperspective look at the Vietnam War on film, moving beyond conventional narratives to include voices and viewpoints often overlooked in mainstream cinema. While the most famous Vietnam War fi...

In the late ’60s and ’70s, New York City under Mayor John V. Lindsay was a turbulent yet vibrant cinematic landscape. With the city sliding toward bankruptcy and social collapse, the Mayor’s Office of Film was established in 1966 to help foster the local film industry, providing financial support...

Noir was never part of mainland China’s literary or cinematic lexicon until relatively recently, when a new wave of gripping, boldly stylized thrillers took up the genre’s conventions—gritty narratives, morally complex characters, and pervasive disillusionment—as a lens for potent social commenta...