Intense, searing visions of life, death, sex, and struggle on the mean streets of Manila, the films of preeminent Filipino auteur Lino Brocka fuse feverish melodrama with hard-hitting social and political commentary. His films—including defining works of Filipino cinema like the gritty urban nigh...

A playfully subversive trailblazer of African cinema, Niger-born Moustapha Alassane created a charmingly lo-fi, irreverently imaginative world all his own. Featuring cartoon frogs, Wild West–style African cowboys, stop-motion puppets, and folkloric heroes, his often witty, iconoclastic fables tak...

From Shakespeare to SUCCESSION, Scottish actor Brian Cox has carved out a distinguished, six-decade-plus career on both stage and screen, along the way winning two Olivier Awards, an Emmy, and a Golden Globe. In this edition of the Craft of Acting, Cox sits down with writer Issac Butler ("The Met...

Born 100 years ago this July in Martinique, the psychiatrist, political philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon inspired oppressed people worldwide to fight for liberation. His radical assertion of anticolonial consciousness and call to resistance can be felt in landmark cinematic bombshells b...

With their hypnotic long takes and elliptical narrative structures, the dreamily enveloping films of Taiwanese cinema titan Hou Hsiao-hsien seem to reshape the rules of time, drifting languorously through the ever-changing sociopolitical realities of Taiwan past and present. Beginning his career ...

From the beginning of their ’60s heyday, the Rolling Stones oozed rebel cool and a sense of danger that made them irresistible cinematic subjects. While their first foray into film, the tour documentary CHARLIE IS MY DARLING, presents the band as young up-and-comers in the process of finding thei...

Coming-of-age films reflect the emotional experience of queerness better than any other kind. Buffeted by waves of adolescent desire and the contortions of self-identification, they often defy convention and category. Selected by series curator Michael Koresky and special guest Jane Schoenbrun (d...

Alan Rudolph’s cinema is a constellation of dreamers, drifters, and disenchanted romantics. A protégé of Robert Altman and a singular voice in independent film, Rudolph has long been a maverick, eschewing convention in favor of elliptical storytelling, painterly compositions, and jazz-inflected r...

Packed with delectable feasts of divine food, glorious international locales, and uproarious comic interplay, the THE TRIP series—appearing here in both its complete original television presentation and its theatrical cuts—follows live-wire improvisational geniuses Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as ...

Farce and fantasy, satire and surrealism mingle in the exuberantly imaginative, elegantly witty films of pioneering French director René Clair, one of the most brilliant innovators of cinema’s foundational decades. Clair’s early silent films, like the Dadaist short ENTR’ACTE and the inventive sci...

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...

An intriguing new voice in independent cinema, Korean American filmmaker Ougie Pak combines a strong, atmospheric feeling for place with a nuanced understanding of the subtle shifts in human relationships. Whether training his camera on a woozy New York City as seen through the eyes of a lovelorn...

Through revelatory use of archival footage, documentarian Matt Wolf sheds light on the nearly forgotten stories of visionary outsiders and queer heroes whose ahead-of-their-time contributions to culture have only begun to be fully appreciated.

Among the greatest filmmakers working today, Chinese master Jia Zhang-Ke is the foremost cinematic chronicler of the vast changes that have transformed his country over the last half century in its transition from communism to a globalized, increasingly market-based society. Beginning his career ...

Widely recognized for his prolific acting career, Tim Blake Nelson has also pursued an impressive parallel path as a director, often working from his own screenplays. Blending narrative depth and raw emotion, his films vary in style and subject—from the haunting rural tragedy EYE OF GOD (streamin...

A true hero of DIY cinema, Jem Cohen has been pursuing his own brand of defiantly independent artistry for more than four decades across films of many shapes and sizes, including city symphonies, collaborations with musicians, artist portraits, and semiscripted features. A poetic chronicler of ur...

When the 1968 edition of the Cannes Film Festival opened amid widespread civil unrest, filmmakers began pulling their movies from the schedule in solidarity with the workers and students protesting across France. This series gathers select titles from the year’s official lineup, alongside a scene...

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...

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...