One of the most innovative and enigmatic directors of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette approached filmmaking as a kind of choose-your-own-adventure of the imagination, crafting sprawling, immersive works that unfold as labyrinths, games, and puzzles to be deciphered. Blurring the boundaries b...

Prolific, Australian-born director John Farrow was one of studio-era Hollywood’s great unsung craftsmen, consistently elevating what could have been routine, B-budget genre fare through stylish visuals and a vivid feeling for place and character. It was in the realm of noir that he made his great...

Specializing in tender, sensitive explorations of queer and Asian identity, writer-director Ray Yeung has carved out a unique place in contemporary Hong Kong cinema to tell intimate stories of gay love finding a way in the face of repression and prejudice. Shot in New York City, FRONT COVER is a ...

One of the most exciting and adventurous film festivals to emerge in recent years, Prismatic Ground brings together aesthetically innovative, politically radical work at the intersection of experimental and documentary cinema. This selection of shorts from the festival’s first four editions offer...

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...

Gooey, splattery, fleshy nightmares of contagion and transformation, the audacious cinematic transgressions of David Cronenberg—whose latest film, THE SHROUDS, infects theaters this April—are not so much watched as experienced in a visceral, full-body wave of can’t-look-away revulsion and fascina...

Of all the rebellious talents to emerge from the Japanese New Wave, Masahiro Shinoda (1931–2025) may have been the most versatile and elusive. From his early contributions to the New Wave’s counterculture eruption (YOUTH IN FURY) and his brooding breakout thriller PALE FLOWER to his subsequent pe...

FEATURING A NEW INTRODUCTION BY CRITIC IMOGEN SARA SMITH

Moody, shadow-latticed cinematography; exquisitely wrought dialogue; an intoxicating sense of world-weary fatalism: welcome to the world of French cinema in the 1930s and ’40s, when the style known as poetic realism—rooted in working-class...

A writer turned director whose literary background lends his films their novelistic weight, South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong has made some of the most searching and emotionally devastating works in contemporary cinema. Suffused with all the beauty, pain, and tension of real life, his films look...

To mark the release of his acclaimed latest, MISERICORDIA, we’re revisiting the daring, dreamlike, darkly comic, and defiantly queer films of director Alain Guiraudie, who has carved out a distinctive place within French cinema through his transgressive explorations of sex, desire, death, and ali...

In their urgent and empathetic documentaries, husband-and-wife team Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson explore issues of identity, injustice, and activist resistance in the Black diaspora. From AMERICAN PROMISE, an intimate chronicle of two Black boys (one their own son) navigating the pitfalls ...

With her heart-shaped face, casual elegance, and natural charm, Claudette Colbert was one of the most effortlessly sophisticated, easy-to-love stars of Hollywood’s golden age. While her deep saucer eyes could generate real pathos in tear-jerking melodramas like TORCH SINGER and IMITATION OF LIFE,...

One of the leading figures of the LA Rebellion—the new wave of Black American independent cinema that emerged from UCLA’s film school in the 1970s and ’80s—Billy Woodberry created one of the movement’s defining works with his neorealist masterpiece BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS, an aching portrait of...

A true cinematic revolutionary who used the camera as her tool in the fight against oppression in all forms, the Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez brought the stories of ordinary Cubans to the screen with a bracing immediacy and insight. Drawing on her background in ethnography, Gómez became her co...

Ever wondered about the sadomasochistic sex lives of snails? Or about the cannibalistic maternal instincts of hamsters? Wonder no more, for the one and only Isabella Rossellini explains it all in these singularly strange and delightful short films that combine science, performance art, and DIY pu...

One of contemporary French cinema’s most intriguing auteurs, Axelle Ropert employs an alchemical blend of narrative classicism and subtle expressionism to create nuanced explorations of human relationships and the division between the worlds of children and adults. Particularly concerned with the...

Arguably the greatest comic genius of the silent era, Buster Keaton turned the adage “less is more” into slapstick gold, using his perpetually passive, poker-faced visage to wring laughs from the most absurd situations. A child of vaudeville, he transferred the knockabout style of physical comedy...

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;...

As a chameleon who continually reinvented his musical persona, David Bowie was a natural actor who lent his singular yet slippery presence to a number of carefully chosen, always surprising film projects. While his first major screen role in Nicolas Roeg’s hallucinatory science-fiction epic THE M...

Extravagant, dazzlingly stylish visions of decadence and decay, the films of Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino train a cunning eye on the worlds of wealth, celebrity, and power to reveal the moral rot lurking below their seductively glittering surfaces. All made in collaboration with his regular le...

As his latest film, the Palme d’Or–winning ANORA, continues to garner acclaim, we’re revisiting the early work of Sean Baker, who for more than twenty years has carved out a distinctive place within American independent cinema exploring the lives of characters on the margins of society with a com...

A sui generis icon of counterculture cinema and style, John Waters upends traditional notions of “good taste” and heteronormative social conventions with a gleefully transgressive mix of camp humor, outrageous provocation, and daring empathy. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, he sits d...

The great prickly humanist of British cinema, Mike Leigh has forged a body of work unique in its concern for the struggles of ordinary people and the social fabric of working-class London. Famously born from a process of extensive improvisation with his powerhouse actors, Leigh’s films inhabit a ...

Originator of the hugely popular ZATOICHI and LONE WOLF AND CUB franchises, Kenji Misumi was a master of the chanbara (“sword fighting”) genre who brought thrilling stylistic flourishes and unique psychological and emotional depth to his many classic films. Among his finest achievements, the thre...