Among the most fascinating chapters of cinematic history is that of the so-called “race films” that flourished in the U.S. between the 1920s and ’40s. Unlike the “black cast” films produced within the Hollywood studio system, these films not only starred African Americans but were funded, written...

A true trailblazer of independent cinema, Charles Burnett has brought images of Black American life to the screen with authenticity, empathy, and stirring poetry. Bringing together landmarks like KILLER OF SHEEP and TO SLEEP WITH ANGER, lesser-known gems such as THE GLASS SHIELD and THE ANNIHILAT...

Edward Yang made films on a monumental scale, bringing novelistic depth to sprawling stories of human connection, alienation, and self-discovery set in a rapidly changing Taiwan. Capturing intricate webs of criss-crossing social relationships with his masterful long takes, Yang’s films—including ...

Few filmmakers have forged a voice as singular and uncategorizable as that of Ukrainian iconoclast Kira Muratova. Working on the margins of Soviet and post-Soviet cinema, she withstood decades of censorship to realize her uncompromising vision in fascinatingly fragmented, expressionistically heig...

A master of cinematic spectacle whose genre-bending films incorporate sumptuous period detail, exhilarating fantasy, martial-arts mayhem, and theatrical artifice, Hong Kong cinema titan Tsui Hark dazzles viewers with his colorful, richly imagined worlds drawn from myth and legend. Whether blendin...

The complex dynamics between mothers and daughters is at the heart of these beautifully understated shorts by Colombian director Sofía Camargo. In BY THE RIVER, an unspoken grief hovers in the household of a newly single mother and her two daughters, while in NOSTOS, a young girl acts out in defi...

Built around her ineffably plaintive voice, the music of ANOHNI speaks to the soul like no other, entwining aching human emotion with a cutting political edge. Curated by ANOHNI herself, this selection of music videos—presented alongside TURNING, a performance-art concert film by Charles Atlas an...

One of the essential but long-neglected voices of the French New Wave, Jacques Rozier was a comedic master whose small yet rich body of work remains ripe for rediscovery. Starting with his feature debut, ADIEU PHILIPPINE, Rozier was determined to explode conventional story forms, combine seemingl...

Chilling, unblinking confrontations with the void of modern existence, the films of Michael Haneke dare viewers to reckon with the links between media, violence, capitalism, and inequality in an increasingly sterile, alienated world. With his first three theatrical features—THE SEVENTH CONTINENT,...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...