In 1954, an enormous beast clawed its way out of the sea, destroying everything in its path—and changing movies forever. The arresting original GODZILLA soon gave rise to an entire monster-movie genre (kaiju eiga), but the King of the Monsters continued to reign supreme: in fourteen fiercely ent...

A stocking stuffer of holiday shorts captures both the magic of the season and the melancholy of what can be the loneliest time of year. From a cozy stop-motion treasure (A CHRISTMAS DREAM) to striking early works by renowned auteurs like Lynne Ramsay (GASMAN), these by turns festive, funny, and ...

Criterion Collection Edition #1030

This compilation of five early short films by Martin Scorsese offers a fascinating window onto his artistic development. Spanning the years from Scorsese’s time at NYU in the mid-1960s to the late ’70s, when he was emerging as one of the era’s most electrifying...

The search for identity is at the core of Colombian-Canadian director Lina Rodriguez’s intimate, richly impressionistic films. Informed by her own immigrant experience, her narrative features like SO MUCH TENDERNESS and THIS TIME TOMORROW and her acclaimed documentary MY TWO VOICES capture women ...

Wormholes to more wormholes, the continually surprising audiovisual essays of Morgan Quaintance draw incisive connections between the most seemingly disparate of subjects—see how his quietly radical MISSING TIME moves, almost imperceptibly, from a consideration of New Hampshire alien abductions a...

Over the last decade, Third Horizon has established itself as a champion of exceptional Caribbean cinema rooted in the region’s locus as a global crossroads of both history and geography, a pivot around which the old world became the new, and a harbinger of an intersectional future ravaged by col...

Though his filmography to date consists of only three features and a dozen or so acclaimed, eclectic short films, Dustin Guy Defa has carved out a unique niche as one of American independent cinema’s most intriguing and defiantly unorthodox auteurs. Interested, above all, in people and their rela...

The exquisitely stylized, richly emotional films of Hong Kong New Wave auteur Stanley Kwan employ the conventions of melodrama with a rare sensitivity and sincerity. Empathetically attuned to the longings and struggles of women, his masterpieces—the sumptuous ghost story ROUGE and the kaleidoscop...

Whether working in animation, live action, or a no-holds-barred blend of the two, underground creative force Leah Shore makes raunchy, hilarious, neon-blasted cinematic transgressions that explode with a feverish, mad-scientist visual energy. Expect shape-shifting surrealism, Day-Glo delirium, an...

A series of eight densely layered experimental video essays by Vietnamese American artist Tran T. Kim-Trang, The Blindness Series encompasses a dizzying array of themes and aesthetic strategies as it explores the many metaphorical resonances surrounding blindness and vision. Ranging in style from...

The first woman from Burkina Faso to direct a narrative film, Fanta Régina Nacro addresses complex social issues with a gently subversive, lightly comic touch. Tackling everything from AIDS and sexual health to gender roles and relations to the evolving place of tradition within the modern world,...

Delve deeper into the labyrinthine psyche of surrealist nightmare-weaver David Lynch with these unsettling, hallucinatory shorts that reflect the origins and evolution of his singular style. Spanning the early experimental and painterly works that laid the foundation for his cult sensation ERASER...

Coined in 1994 by critic Mark Dery, the term “Afrofuturism” has become an essential framework for art about imagined and alternative Black experiences. As the author Ytasha Womack writes, “Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocen...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

In 1979, poet Adrienne Rich observed that “one of the most powerful social and political catalysts of the past decade has been the speaking of women with other women, the telling of our secrets, the comparing of wounds and sharing of words.” Curated by guest programmer Nellie Killian, Tell Me cel...

Intense, handsome, and gifted with a rare capacity for conveying inner turmoil and doubt, Jean-Louis Trintignant was one of the greatest actors of European art-house cinema, bringing intelligence and passion to carefully crafted performances in a number of all-time classics. After early success a...

Hailed for her vibrant explorations of culture clash and connection in films like MONSOON WEDDING and MISSISSIPPI MASALA, Indian American auteur Mira Nair has pursued an equally distinguished career as a director of short films that further explore the ways in which deep-rooted cultural tradition...