In the 1990s, underground music—from punk and hip-hop to indie rock and electronica—exploded into the pop-culture consciousness through some of the defining films of the era. Movies like PUMP UP THE VOLUME didn’t just capture the social and aesthetic codes of disaffected Gen Xers; they also deliv...

Few filmmakers navigate the libidinal and the lyrical quite like Spanish sensualist Bigas Luna, a provocateur with a painter’s eye, whose films are lush with eroticism, surrealist flourishes, delirium, and grotesquery. His films—including the Iberian Trilogy comprising the international sensation...

A one-of-a-kind performer, choreographer, and director, Hong Kong superstar Sammo Hung reinvented action cinema as a space of exuberant physicality and unexpected grace. Trained at the same Beijing-opera academy as Jackie Chan (with whom he costarred in films like MY LUCKY STARS), Hung deployed t...

Wim Wenders is cinema’s preeminent poet of the open road, soulfully tracing the journeys of wanderers and drifters searching for themselves. Over the course of his incredible five-decade career, Wenders has traversed the landscapes of his native Germany (ALICE IN THE CITIES, KINGS OF THE ROAD), t...

Temperatures and passions sizzle in these scorching summertime tales of desire—the sultry cinematic equivalents of a perfect beach read. Built around the electric chemistry of gorgeous golden-age Hollywood stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift (A PLACE IN THE SUN), Audrey Hepburn and G...

The best films about artists don’t just document their lives and practices, but are themselves acts of artistic interpretation. Eschewing conventional biography in favor of formal experimentation, these boldly conceived works mirror the creativity of their subjects through the language of film. U...

Take a dip in some of cinema’s most memorable swimming pools—those uncanny, aqueous environs where interior collides with exterior, the private flirts with the public, and time seems suspended above the watermark. Serving variously as sites of adolescent sexual awakening in coming-of-age portrait...

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 ...

Gena Rowlands forever changed the face of screen acting with her raw emotional realism and immersive approach to performance, which blurred the lines between actor and character to the point of no return. Fearlessly exploring the extreme edges of human relationships and emotion in films like the ...

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...

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...

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...