Along with fellow European émigrés like Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder, German-born Robert Siodmak was instrumental in importing the expressionist visual style and hard-bitten existentialist sensibility that would define Hollywood film noir, arguably creating more classics of the genre than any othe...
Though best known for the subversive, extravagantly stylized color melodramas he directed in the 1950s, Douglas Sirk’s brilliance was not limited to his work in Technicolor, as seen in these equally rich, relatively unsung black-and-white gems made during the same period. Featuring a moody myster...
One of Hollywood’s most popular screen couples, Doris Day and Rock Hudson revitalized their careers and the romantic-comedy formula with the 1959 megahit PILLOW TALK, delighting audiences with a teasing sexual innuendo that they would deploy to similar success in the follow-ups LOVER COME BACK an...
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; hot-button political thrillers ripped from the...
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...
An initiative of the Kiarostami Foundation, Docunight is a streaming platform dedicated to documentaries from and about Iran. As Iranian women protest for a say in the future of their society, Docunight presents four piercing works by female filmmakers, which examine the parts that marriage and r...
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...
A unique and blazing talent, Bob Hoskins was one of the most versatile and consistently riveting actors Britain ever produced. “Five-foot-six cubic” in his own words, Hoskins combined a brawny physicality with a vast emotional range, leading to a series of indelible performances: as a beleaguered...
Each year the legendary Flaherty Film Seminar invites participants to reconsider their understanding of cinema through a rigorous program of thought-provoking, boundary-breaking works organized around a salient theme. Taking the notion of “Opacity”—defined as that which cannot be reduced by the d...
Specializing in portraits of powerful and often controversial figures, Marina Zenovich (ROBIN WILLIAMS: COME INSIDE MY MIND, ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED) began her career with these three idiosyncratic documentaries, which range from a candid look at the struggles of American independent f...
The lauded French Canadian filmmaker behind the recent blockbuster sensation DUNE, Denis Villeneuve started his career with a series of darkly funny, offbeat films laced with the intriguing science-fiction themes that would recur in much of his later work. Following a striking, technologically pr...
Fear comes in all forms in this selection of dread-inducing shorts. Featuring unsettling early works by masters of menace like David Lynch (THE ALPHABET) and Guillermo del Toro (GEOMETRIA) as well as innovative contemporary films that use horror to confront issues such as racism (HAIR WOLF) and c...
Celebrating its sixtieth edition this fall, the New York Film Festival is a cornerstone of American film culture, introducing U.S. audiences to some of the most exciting films from around the world for six decades running. This selection of some of the festival’s greatest hits stretches back to i...
One of the world’s oldest art forms meets one of the youngest in this suite of shorts that showcase the beauty, grace, grit, and endless innovation of dance in its myriad forms. Including boundary-breaking works by directors like Shirley Clarke (DANCE IN THE SUN, A MOMENT IN LOVE), Julie Dash (FO...
Utilizing fractured editing, cacophonous sound design, and a whole lot of (possibly imaginary) cats, Lori Felker’s DISCONTINUITY brilliantly evokes the rapidly escalating pileup of interruptions, incongruities, and absurdities that arise when a long-term couple reunite after an extended separatio...
One of contemporary international cinema’s most vital voices, Australian Kaytetye filmmaker Warwick Thornton spotlights the history, lives, and experiences of Australia’s Indigenous community, weaving elements of traditional Aboriginal storytelling into works of immense beauty, pain, and power. S...
