Sun-dappled waves and swirling ocean depths reflect psychological turmoil in these moodily atmospheric tales of seaside suspense set against rugged shorelines and restless waters. In the interplay between location and plot, films like OUT OF THE FOG and THE GHOST WRITER exploit the sense of isola...

Writer, satirist, “pornographer,” surrealist, and provocateur, Terry Southern was one of the great literary minds of his time. As a screenwriter, he brought his irreverent, gonzo sensibility to some of the defining counterculture films of the 1960s. Invited by Stanley Kubrick to assist on the scr...

Kathryn Bigelow’s early films are bracing fusions of kinetic genre thrills and potent social critique, probing cultural anxieties and questions of identity with style and intelligence to burn. THE LOVELESS, her assured directorial debut, is a reinvention of the road movie, blending existential de...

With its cynical worldview and sympathy for doomed outsiders, it’s no wonder that film noir ran afoul of the Hollywood blacklist. Beginning in the 1940s, many left-leaning filmmakers found in noir the perfect vehicle for challenging the dream factory’s sunny view of American society. Campaigns li...

In the late ’60s and ’70s, New York City under Mayor John V. Lindsay was a turbulent yet vibrant cinematic landscape. With the city sliding toward bankruptcy and social collapse, the Mayor’s Office of Film was established in 1966 to help foster the local film industry, providing financial support...

A magnetic screen presence who brings passionate intensity and fearless emotional depth to her numerous acclaimed performances, Penélope Cruz has been a major force in both Spanish and American cinema for more than three decades. In this, her birthday month of April, we revisit a selection of car...

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...

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...

Argentina gave rise to some of the finest and most fascinating crime thrillers of the postwar noir boom—pitch-black tales of lust, greed, guilt, and deception suffused with the passionate intensity of tango and sculpted in striking expressionist shadows. This selection of newly restored films fro...

One of the greatest American filmmakers to emerge in the 1970s, Joan Micklin Silver drew on her background as the daughter of Russian-born Jewish parents to write and direct beautifully bittersweet portraits of women, immigrants, and marginalized communities. With profound empathy, her films vivi...

A director of such distinctive, overpowering vision that he inspired his own adjective, David Lynch made films that seemed telegraphed straight from his unconscious to the screen. From the unsettling surrealist imagery of his midnight-movie classic ERASERHEAD to the harrowing suburban nightmare T...

Shattering taboos with her unflinching, often shocking explorations of female sexuality and pleasure, Catherine Breillat plunges fearlessly into the corporeal realms of eroticism and violence. The two are inextricably linked in her daring body of work, which encompasses controversial coming-of-ag...

Following a nine-year absence from the screen, the King of the Monsters roared back with a vengeance in 1984 with THE RETURN OF GODZILLA, inaugurating a new era in the romping reptile’s mythology. The ferociously entertaining kaiju spectaculars of the 1980s and ’90s—which brought back familiar fa...

Hong Kong is home to one of the world’s most exciting pop-filmmaking traditions—and there’s no bigger event in its box-office calendar than Lunar New Year, typically reserved for the industry’s most crowd-pleasing releases. These genre-blending touchstones bring audiences together for an escape i...

With his lush and sensual visuals, pitch-perfect soundtracks, and soulful romanticism, Wong Kar Wai has established himself as one of the defining auteurs of contemporary cinema. Joined by such key collaborators as cinematographer Christopher Doyle; editor and production and costume designer Will...

Cofounded by former Beatle George Harrison in 1978, the storied production studio and distribution company HandMade Films gave new life to British cinema in the 1980s, taking chances on risky projects and first-time directors to bring audiences future classics like THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY, WITHNAIL ...

For five decades, Alfred Hitchcock explored our innermost anxieties, desires, and obsessions in his diabolically constructed thrillers, which redefined the mechanics of screen terror through meticulous editing, voyeuristic camera work, and unforgettable set pieces. In endlessly studied and imitat...

Yasujiro Ozu was Japanese cinema’s great poet of everyday life, and, 120 years after his birth, he remains one of the most significant film artists who ever lived. From the late 1920s to the early ’60s, Ozu explored the rhythms and tensions of a country trying to reconcile modern and traditional ...

“If Africans do not tell their own stories, Africa will soon disappear,” declared Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese cinematic revolutionary whose career-long project to illuminate the lives of the marginalized made him the continent’s most influential and widely acclaimed director. A manual laborer...

A singular, iconoclastic artist, Robert Bresson left behind an astonishing body of work, defined by the search for what he called “not beautiful images, but necessary images.” In a long, visionary career that began in the 1940s and ended in the 1980s, he continually refined the strict precision o...

Images of unforgettable terror and strange beauty exist side by side in these darkly imaginative works that fuse genre chills with formal innovation. Tapping into horror’s potential to manifest our subconscious fears, visionary directors like David Lynch (ERASERHEAD), Dario Argento (SUSPIRIA), an...

In the latest edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, Queens-born filmmaker and famously delightful raconteur James Gray (TWO LOVERS, ARMAGEDDON TIME) discusses his filmic education courtesy of New York’s vibrant repertory cinemas and the formative discoveries that shaped his uniquely intelligent ap...

Hal Hartley is a true independent, boasting one of the most idiosyncratic bodies of work in all of contemporary cinema. First emerging in the late 1980s and early ’90s with a fully formed sensibility on display in the barbed romantic comedies THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH and TRUST, he quickly became on...

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...