The Gay Best Friend can be helpful. The Gay Best Friend can be catty. They can be unconditionally loving or secretly sinister. Yet they all have something in common: we never learn very much about their lives, existing as they do to support, elucidate, or put into relief something about their fil...

First comes love, then comes anarchy—at least that’s how it works in the wild, upside-down world of classic screwball. Like a romcom on speed, the screwball comedy supercharges the genre with fizzy battle-of-the-sexes mayhem; fast-talking, diamond-cut dialogue; and a perfectly calibrated combinat...

Sleekly stylish, deliriously plotted, and unabashedly steamy, the erotic thrillers of the 1980s and ’90s are both the ultimate guilty pleasure and an illuminating reflection of an era’s changing attitudes toward sex on-screen. As the ’70s came to a close, with studio filmmaking in decline, home v...

Proud, rebellious, colorful, intimate, and frank, these visions of LGBTQ+ life include beloved modern classics as well as hidden gems. From staples of the art-house canon (JE TU IL ELLE, QUERELLE) to highlights of the New Queer Cinema explosion (PARIS IS BURNING) and contemporary showstoppers fro...

Graced with immense empathy and respect for those who go their own way, Jeanie Finlay’s intimate documentaries tell richly emotional stories of outsiders, artists, and everyday eccentrics who defy convention. Refusing to exploit her subjects, she finds tender human comedy and drama in stories of ...

Founded by Richard Linklater in 1985 as a screening series dedicated to bringing experimental and art cinema to Austin, Texas, the Austin Film Society has since grown into a cultural powerhouse and cornerstone of the city’s creative community—all while remaining true to its edgy, eclectic roots. ...

A series of eight densely layered experimental video essays by Vietnamese American artist Tran T. Kim-Trang, The Blindness Series encompasses a dizzying array of themes and aesthetic strategies as it explores the many metaphorical resonances surrounding blindness and vision. Ranging in style from...

The first woman from Burkina Faso to direct a narrative film, Fanta Régina Nacro addresses complex social issues with a gently subversive, lightly comic touch. Tackling everything from AIDS and sexual health to gender roles and relations to the evolving place of tradition within the modern world,...

One of the most creative and galvanizing venues for film exhibition to emerge during the pandemic, Prismatic Ground is a festival centered on the intersection between experimental and documentary film. This selection of shorts from its first two editions, in April 2021 and May 2022, offer an ecle...

Delve deeper into the labyrinthine psyche of surrealist nightmare-weaver David Lynch with these unsettling, hallucinatory shorts that reflect the origins and evolution of his singular style. Spanning the early experimental and painterly works that laid the foundation for his cult sensation ERASER...

Deepa Dhanraj’s films are decolonial feminism in action. A filmmaker whose intersectional view of gender oppression and collaborative approach to documentary were far ahead of their time, Dhanraj has dealt frankly with issues of class, caste, labor, patriarchy, and state violence over the course ...

Before he established himself as the most daring director-star of the silent era, Buster Keaton got his start in films as a sidekick to the wildly popular comedian Rosce “Fatty” Arbuckle, honing his soon-to-be-iconic deadpan persona and learning the art of moviemaking from the inside out over the...

Coined in 1994 by critic Mark Dery, the term “Afrofuturism” has become an essential framework for art about imagined and alternative Black experiences. As the author Ytasha Womack writes, “Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocen...

A cross section of the last seven decades of international cinema, this lineup of past winners of the Academy Award for best foreign-language film includes masterpieces by titans like Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Luis Buñuel; high-water marks of the Czechoslovak New Wave;...

On the occasion of the release of his latest film, the powerful, audacious EO, revisit three of the most acclaimed works by the ever-fascinating, unfailingly original Polish veteran Jerzy Skolimowski. Each made outside his homeland yet infused with a mordant irony that is distinctively Central Eu...

Founded in 2005 by pioneering nonfiction filmmaker Albert Maysles, the Harlem-based Maysles Documentary Center has fostered an incredible sense of community through its diverse, thought-provoking, and often challenging programming; classes that teach the fundamentals of documentary storytelling t...

Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund—who has made waves in recent years with his art-house sensations FORCE MAJEURE and the Palme d’Or–winning THE SQUARE—began his career with these three fearlessly unflinching studies of uneasy social dynamics, codes of masculinity, and the tension between the grou...

European exploitation cinema doesn’t get any more exhilarating than the furious crime sagas of Italian cult auteur Fernando Di Leo, a maestro of pulp whose hard-boiled thrillers deliver both explosively stylized violence and subversive social commentary underpinned by a righteous moral worldview....

Long before he became one of the most renowned artists in world cinema, the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami began his cinematic career at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (a.k.a. Kanoon) in Tehran, where he honed his distinctive style and themes and...

In the seventeen years between his first two theatrical features (1971’s BLEAK MOMENTS and 1988’s HIGH HOPES), Mike Leigh, the great humanist of British cinema, sharpened his distinctive voice and famously improvisatory process at the BBC, where he directed a string of striking, bittersweet slice...

A fearlessly transgressive, long-overlooked pioneer of feminist cinema, Swedish actor turned director Mai Zetterling ruffled the feathers of the patriarchal establishment with a string of bracingly modern, sexually frank, and politically incendiary films focused on female agency and the turbulent...

With her brilliant feature debut, NANNY—winner of the 2022 Sundance Grand Jury Prize—garnering acclaim, now is the perfect time to discover the smartly stylish short films of writer-director Nikyatu Jusu. By turns irreverent, provocative, powerful, and unsettling, these films—all centered on comp...

Focused on pivotal moments in the lives of women, the films of trailblazing feminist director Joyce Chopra were among the first in American cinema to give authentic expression to the intimate experiences of female adolescence, sexual awakening, and motherhood. Presented in conjunction with the re...