Directed by William Friedkin • 1977 • United States
Starring Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal

William Friedkin takes Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic palm-sweater THE WAGES OF FEAR and transforms it into a blood-and-guts opera of existential delirium. The setup is familiar: four desper...

Directed by Michael Mann • 2004 • United States
Starring Jamie Foxx, Tom Cruise, Jada Pinkett Smith

Michael Mann’s ever-stylish eye turns Los Angeles into a sleek neonoir night world in this precision-crafted thriller. Tom Cruise is icy-cool charismatic as Vincent, a silver-haired professional c...

Directed by Martin Scorsese • 1985 • United States
Starring Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom

Desperate to escape his mind-numbing routine, uptown Manhattan office worker Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) ventures downtown for a hookup with a mystery woman (Rosanna Arquette). So begins the...

Directed by Richard Linklater • 1995 • United States
Starring Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

An exquisitely understated ode to the thrill of romantic possibility, the inaugural installment of THE BEFORE TRILOGY opens with a chance encounter between two solitary young strangers. After they hit it off o...

Directed by John Carpenter • 1976 • United States
Starring Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer

John Carpenter’s lean, mean second feature puts a gritty exploitation spin on Howard Hawks’s classic western RIO BRAVO, transposing the story to a soon-to-be-closed LA police station where a gr...

Directed by Jules Dassin • 1950 • United States
Starring Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Googie Withers

Two-bit hustler Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) longs for “a life of ease and plenty.” Trailed by an inglorious history of go-nowhere schemes, he tries to hatch a lucrative plan with a famous wr...

Directed by Peter Ho-sun Chan • 1996 • Hong Kong
Starring Leon Lai, Maggie Cheung, Kristy Yang

This immensely moving tale of love struggling against fate unfolds over the course of a decade as a pair of Chinese mainlanders—the naive Li Xiao-jun (Leon Lai) and the streetwise Li Qiao (Maggie Cheun...

Directed by Abel Ferrara • 1992 • United States
Starring Harvey Keitel, Peggy Gormley, Victor Argo

Abel Ferrara’s harrowing vision of sin, Catholic guilt, and the search for salvation in a grimy New York City underworld is one of the most controversial and indelible works of the art of the 1990s...

Directed by William Friedkin • 1995 • United States
Starring David Caruso, Linda Fiorentino, Chazz Palminteri

In the wake of the massive success of BASIC INSTINCT, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas returned to erotic-thriller territory with this strikingly perverse noir mystery, directed with atmospher...

Directed by Lizzie Borden • 1976 • United States
Starring Kathryn Bigelow, Ariel Bock, Marion Cajori

While Lizzie Borden’s features BORN IN FAMES and WORKING GIRLS have taken their place as landmarks of feminist cinema, her debut—the fascinating experimental documentary REGROUPING—has gone large...

Directed by Mike Nichols • 1966 • United States
Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal

Mike Nichols’s taboo-shattering adaptation of Edward Albee’s groundbreaking Broadway play rips the façade of civility off the dysfunctional marriage between an alcoholic college professor (Ric...

Directed by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou • 1996 • France
Starring Jacques Perrin, Kristin Scott Thomas

Experience the strange, beautiful, surreal world of insects as never before in this singular, artful nature documentary, which employs specially created cameras and lenses—developed over...

Directed by Billy Wilder • 1950 • United States
Starring William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim

Hollywood’s ultimate poison-pen letter to itself, Billy Wilder’s acerbic masterpiece casts real-life silent-screen icon Gloria Swanson as a faded movie star who draws a struggling screenwr...

Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky • 2000 • Hungary
Starring Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz, Hanna Schygulla

This mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, WERCKMEISTER HARMONIE...

Directed by Frank Perry • 1981 • United States
Starring Faye Dunaway, Diana Scarwid, Steve Forrest

Outrageous and controversial, this infamous adaptation of Christina Crawford’s best-selling tell-all is built around a powerhouse performance by Faye Dunaway as legendary movie star Joan Crawford. ...

Directed by Paul Vecchiali • 1970 • France
Starring Jacques Perrin, Julien Guiomar, Eva Simonet

A singularly strange and haunting French giallo released before directors like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci brought the subgenre to international prominence, Paul Vecchiali’s THE STRANGLER equally su...

Directed by William Friedkin • 1973 • United States
Starring Jason Miller, Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair

One of the most terrifying and influential movies ever made, William Friedkin’s groundbreaking, controversial mix of body horror and religious iconography still shocks. When a charming twelve-ye...

Directed by Michael Mann • 1995 • United States
Starring Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino face off in this titanic crime epic from pulp poet Michael Mann. A gang of thieves led by snazzy super-criminal Neal McCauley (De Niro) pull off a string of robberies on ba...

Directed by Lizzie Borden • 1983 • United States
Starring Honey, Adele Bertei, Jean Satterfield

The film that rocked the foundations of the 1980s underground, this postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a social-democratic cultural revolution. W...

Directed by Otto Preminger • 1950 • United States
Starring Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Gary Merrill

Ben Hecht’s hard-bitten dialogue, Otto Preminger’s morally ambiguous direction, and one of Dana Andrews’s finest performances come together in this dark, brooding procedural. New York City cop Mar...

Directed by Elia Kazan • 1950 • United States
Starring Richard Widmark, Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes

One night in the New Orleans slums, vicious hoodlum Blackie (Jack Palance, in his film debut) and his friends kill an undocumented immigrant who won too much in a card game. When Dr. Clint Re...

Directed by Jean Eustache • 1973 • France
Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Françoise Lebrun, Isabelle Weingarten

After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May 1968 came THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Jean Eustache that captures, through the microc...

Directed by Gordon Douglas • 1954 • United States
Starring James Whitmore, James Arness, Joan Weldon

Man has split the atom and ushered in a new era. But how could he know he would also create THEM? Boasting remarkable, ahead-of-their-time special effects, this science-fiction landmark begins in...

Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe • 2021 • United States

This illuminating cinematic essay uses film scenes to tell of the forced cultural appropriation of a world-famous landscape. Monument Valley is one of the most recognizable vistas in the world. Its iconographic use in American westerns has...