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...

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...

In the aftermath of World War II, Britain cultivated its own form of film noir with a distinctly English accent. Marked by fatalistic wit, visual lyricism, and a pronounced concern for working-class lives, British crime dramas reflected an era of turbulent change, as generational and class confli...

As the daughter of two legendary film artists, Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, Isabella Rossellini grew up immersed in cinema before making her own indelible mark on the medium through her brilliant performances for auteurs like David Lynch and Guy Maddin and her own acclaimed projects lik...

A founder of Italian neorealism, Roberto Rossellini brought to filmmaking a documentary-like authenticity and philosophical stringency that changed the course of film history. Rossellini broke out with ROME OPEN CITY, a shattering and vivid chronicle of the Nazi occupation of Italy’s capital, fol...

Born one hundred years ago this month, Japanese New Wave renegade Seijun Suzuki combined a deliriously inventive approach to filmmaking and a fast-and-loose attitude toward genre expectations to make some of the most thrillingly stylish movies of all time, frequently transcending narrative logic ...

The comedian and actor presents a selection of his favorite films, and talks about watching movies with his dad, fart jokes in Ozu pictures, and why Bergman’s THE VIRGIN SPRING is hilarious. Be warned—some introductions contain plot spoilers!

One hundred years ago, Harold Lloyd gave the movies one of their most meme-able moments—the anxious, thrilling, clock-hanging climax of SAFETY LAST!, a film that still stands as a high-water mark of slapstick invention. Though often overlooked in favor of his more famous silent-clown contemporari...

Seemingly ageless even as she turns seventy this March, the incomparable French actor Isabelle Huppert is something of a paradox: an enigma who lives in front of the camera, inviting our gaze while maintaining a sense of deep, unknowable mystery. Specializing in portrayals of complex women who tr...

One of the key, unsung visionaries of the Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s and early ’70s, Ester Krumbachová left an indelible imprint on some of the movement’s defining films—including A REPORT ON THE PARTY AND GUESTS, DAISIES, and VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS—through her inimitable work as...

In the 1960s, filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic spilled into the streets in search of cinematic truth, armed with lightweight cameras that allowed for an unprecedented level of intimacy and liberated documentary from the conventions of voice-over narration and talking-head interviews. Toda...

Once every decade, “Sight and Sound” magazine has polled film critics from around the world and issued a list of the 100 greatest films of all time. Ever since the first poll in 1952, the “Sight and Sound” list has played a central role in film culture, sending movie lovers on obsessive viewing q...

Anchoring both high-profile blockbusters like the CREED and THOR franchises and acclaimed, adventurous indies like SORRY TO BOTHER YOU and PASSING, actor and producer Tessa Thompson has emerged as one of the most intriguing and versatile performers of her generation. In this edition of Adventures...

The man who gave the world Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and more, Ishiro Honda was the wizard behind the Japanese monster-movie (kaiju eiga) craze that thrilled legions of international fans in the 1950s and ’60s. Turning the trauma of nuclear attack into larger-than-life pop spectacle, Honda created...

Reality and fantasy, dreams and memories flow freely into one another in the haunting, layered works of iconoclastic auteur Carlos Saura, arguably the most important Spanish filmmaker to emerge between Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar. Achieving international renown during the repressive years of ...

At the vanguard of international filmmaking for six decades, French New Wave titan Jean-Luc Godard exerted an incalculable influence on modern cinema that refuses to wane. With his groundbreaking 1960 debut feature, BREATHLESS, Godard merged elements of high and low culture with an anything-goes ...

There was cinema before the French New Wave, and there was cinema after. The explosion of creative innovation that emanated from France in the late 1950s and early ’60s forever altered the course of film history by opening up new avenues of stylistic experimentation and trumpeting the concept of ...