Spanning fifty-three movies and forty-one editions of the Olympic Games, 100 YEARS OF OLYMPIC FILMS: 1912–2012 is the culmination of a massive, award-winning archival project encompassing dozens of restorations by the International Olympic Committee. The documentaries collected here cast a cinema...

In the early 1930s, Columbia Pictures’ fate changed with the arrival of director Frank Capra, who quickly established a new archetype of Hollywood glamour in Jean Harlow’s moniker-defining Platinum Blonde and, just three years later, swept the Oscars with the comedy sensation It Happened One Nigh...

The thrillingly innovative films of Nicolas Roeg are dazzling, chronology-scrambling puzzles that explode the rules of cinema and leave the viewer to piece together the shards. Distinguishing himself first as a cinematographer for directors such as François Truffaut and Roger Corman, Roeg made th...

From garlic to gap-toothed women, no subject was too esoteric to capture the imagination of Les Blank, an uncompromisingly independent spirit who, for nearly fifty years, disappeared with his camera into subcultures rarely seen on-screen. Seemingly off-the-cuff yet poetically constructed, Blank’s...

In the late 1980s, the spirit of punk was alive and well in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl (Neza for short), the sprawling, slum-choked municipality on the edge of Mexico City where a fiercely nihilistic youth culture sprang up in response to economic stagnation and urban neglect. Beginning in the 1980s, ...

The oldest known surviving film starring an entirely Black cast, this unfinished 1913 romantic comedy—the footage of which was miraculously recovered from the vaults of the bankrupt Biograph film studio, alongside outtakes and a trove of still images from the production—stars legendary Bahamian-A...

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ability to simultaneously embrace conflicting philosophies—he drew from Marxism and Catholicism; and he lived a thoroughly modern, openly gay life while looking to the distant past for inspiration and comfort—was matched by the multifariousness of his artistic output as a fi...

It’s been twenty-five years since cinema bid the twentieth century farewell with an extraordinary batch of films. In retrospect, 1999 was a time of intriguing cross-pollinations between the studios and independents, national and international productions, and high and low culture. Bringing togeth...

While for many major Hollywood studios the 1950s marked the beginning of their decline, for Columbia Pictures it was a decade of ascendance. Spurred by the desire to differentiate their cinematic output from their television programming, the studio went bold with ambitious prestige productions li...

What happened to America in the 1960s? Amid the stream of social upheavals, a wave of films emerged depicting mental illness, madness, extreme emotional states, and chilling violence—jarring transmissions from a new generation of Hollywood iconoclasts that seemed to evoke the very breakdown of th...

One of the most revelatory voices to emerge from the postwar explosion of international art-house cinema, Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman was a master storyteller who startled the world with his stark intensity and naked pursuit of the most profound metaphysical and spiritual questions. The struggl...

Forming a loose trilogy centered around the experiences of young people grappling with issues of sexual, gender, and social identity, the revelatory first three features by French auteur Céline Sciamma—WATER LILIES, TOMBOY, and GIRLHOOD—ache and soar with the pain, confusion, and exhilaration of ...

The language of cinema is limitless in the ecstatically inspired universe of Japanese avant-pop visionary Nobuhiko Obayashi, who gleefully bridged the experimental and the mainstream over the course of a wildly prolific career. From his debut feature—the eyeball-zapping cult-horror freakout HOUSE...

As if conjured from a distant dream or a faded memory, the films of Haitian-Canadian director Miryam Charles are hushed, ghostly meditations on family, memory, trauma, colonization, and migration. Employing richly evocative sound design and tactile 16 mm texture, her impressionistic shorts and he...

Though little-known outside of France, Jean Grémillon was a consummate filmmaker from his country’s golden age. A classical violinist who turned to directing, he went on to make almost fifty films—from documentaries to avant-garde works to melodramas with major stars—in a thirty-year career. Some...

A wildly prolific pioneer of the early-2000s microbudget filmmaking boom, writer, director, and sometimes actor Joe Swanberg brought a startlingly relatable naturalism to his intimate, warts-and-all portraits of twentysomething millennial discontent with his early features HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS...

A rhythm-shattering avant-jazz percussionist and a sui generis martial artist, sculptor, herbalist, and all-around cosmic Renaissance man, the late free-jazz shaman Milford Graves lived a life as liberated and unclassifiable as his music. Including the appropriately kaleidoscopic feature document...

Transcending the rigidity and oppressions of the current moment, this program, produced by Multitude Films and inspired by queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, taps into joy and dares to imagine radical, emancipated visions of queer life. Four short films explore fat beauty and liberation, gender-a...

Now ninety-six years old, director Michael Roemer was always ahead of his time—and at last, after decades of neglect, the world is catching up to his profoundly humanist, unfailingly truthful vision. A Jewish refugee who escaped Nazi Germany as a child, Roemer has made only a handful of features,...

Working across narrative, documentary, animation, experimental, and interactive cinema, Ayoka Chenzira brings the inner worlds of Black women—their hopes, dreams, anxieties, and struggles—to life with heart, humor, and insight. An all-around creative force, she made her mark as an animator with a...

Confronting both the specter of World War II and the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, these stunning late-career triumphs from Japanese iconoclast Nobuhiko Obayashi offer a subversive, typically idiosyncratic reflection on national history and tragedy. Replete with the boldly ...

Everyday reality slips into surrealist reverie in the uncanny visions of Sara Driver, whose films possess the hallucinatory textures and hypnotic rhythms of a waking dream. A central but often overlooked linchpin of the 1980s downtown New York arts scene, Driver made her directorial debut with YO...

These stylistically radical, bracingly contemporary films offer new ways of seeing Philippine myths, pasts, presents, and futures. Making innovative use of digital technologies, extreme color grading, and unexpected aspect ratios, a new generation of young Philippine filmmakers explodes genre con...

Horses and foxes and snails, oh my! The wide, wild world of animals is on parade in a menagerie of wondrous, playful, affectionate shorts, which span silent and sound, documentary and fiction, live action and animation. From mammals to birds to reptiles to mollusks, creatures great and small, cud...