Like his predecessor Hayao Miyazaki, to whom he is often compared, Makoto Shinkai has taken anime to new heights of pure cinematic achievement. Specially attuned to the loneliness of young people living in digitally saturated urban environments, he depicts their longing and need—no matter how imp...

Experimental icon Shirley Clarke synthesized jazz, modern dance, and abstract expressionism into a dynamic vérité style that put her at the forefront of the emergent American independent film scene of the fifties and sixties. Beginning her artistic career as a dancer, she brought a choreographer’...

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 ...

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...

“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...

Mark Lewis makes nature films like you’ve never seen before. In their strangeness, all the sublimity, absurdity, and incomprehensibility of the animal world—especially where it intersects with human society—comes into fascinating and wryly humorous focus. It’s little wonder that Werner Herzog is ...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

A director of such distinctive, overpowering vision that he has inspired his own adjective, David Lynch makes films that seem telegraphed straight from his unconscious to the screen. Now streaming for the first time, Lynch’s newly restored masterpieces LOST HIGHWAY and INLAND EMPIRE, as well as a...

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,...

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...

With her extraordinary Diary Trilogy, trailblazing Hungarian auteur Márta Mészáros fused the personal and the political, entwining her country’s turbulent post–World War II history with a heartrending story drawn from her own life experiences. Tracing the journey of a strong-willed orphan named J...

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 ...

A pair of Hollywood exiles—she was a former script clerk at Columbia, he was an ex–Disney cartoonist and union activist blacklisted for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee—Faith and John Hubley left behind the mainstream to forge a thrillingly experimental ani...

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 ...

A fearlessly transgressive, long-overlooked pioneer of feminist cinema, Swedish actor turned director Mai Zetterling ruffled the feathers of the patriarchal establishment with a string of bracingly modern, sexually frank, and politically incendiary films focused on female agency and the turbulent...

The multifaceted, deeply personal work of Eric Rohmer had an effect on cinema unlike any other. One of the founding critics of the history-making “Cahiers du cinéma,” Rohmer began translating his written manifestos to film in the 1960s, standing apart from his New Wave contemporaries with his pat...

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...

With her breathtaking feature debut, ATLANTICS, French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop has emerged as one of contemporary cinema’s most bracing and distinctive voices. Her singular vision is on full display in her extraordinary short films, intricate, mysterious documentary-fiction hybrid works th...