The road of return is studded with adventure, discovery, and surprise in these tales of epic quests that draw on one of literature’s most enduring narrative archetypes: the journey back home. Whether traversing the hardscrabble highways of Depression-era America (SULLIVAN’S TRAVEL, O BROTHER, WHE...

A performer of rare volatility and range, Courtney Love brings a feral intelligence and bruised glamour to the screen, meriting a place in cinematic culture alongside her hallowed stature in music. In films, Love is not merely an icon crossing mediums; her work with auteurs like Alex Cox (STRAIGH...

The legend of cinema’s most iconic superspy begins here, with the trio of films that turned writer Ian Fleming’s suave secret agent James Bond into a global phenomenon. Featuring Sean Connery’s still-unmatched portrayal of 007—equal parts danger, charm, and wit—DR.NO, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, and G...

With wedding season upon us, take a walk down the aisle of some of cinema’s most unforgettable nuptials. Focusing on the lead-up to and spectacle of the big day itself, these films dramatize the often-conflicting dreams, desires, and fears that bring two people together before the altar, with dir...

A patron saint of punk cinema and borderless storytelling, Alex Cox remains one of the greatest subversives to ever pick up a camera, a rebel auteur who blends gonzo surrealism, anarchic irreverence, and blistering anticapitalist and anti-imperialist critique. From the radioactive deadpan of the ...

Sexy, surreal, and darkly stylish, the short films of French director Yann Gonzalez (KNIFE+HEART) capture ecstatic moments of human (and sometimes beyond human) connection, merging throbbing eroticism with a charge of giallo-like menace to probe the inextricable links between love, sex, death, an...

From the cities we live in to the products we use every day to the typefaces we communicate through, how do the subtle but impactful forces of design shape our lives? That’s the question at the heart of the illuminating documentaries of Gary Hustwit (ENO), who invites us to see the world around u...

As a new generation of movie-mad directors emerged in the 1980s, they drew direct inspiration from the films they grew up watching and obsessing over. The result was a striking run of idiosyncratic Reagan-era remakes in which filmmakers such as John Carpenter (turning the Cold War sci-fi classic ...

Beginning in the 1930s, the ever-growing number of working women inspired a new type of romantic comedy, where meet-cutes come amid desks and typewriters, and the course of true love is entangled with office politics and professional rivalry. The genre was tailor-made for stars like Jean Arthur, ...

Born from a period of intense political upheaval, these radical Caribbean films spotlight vital stories of workers’ movements, decolonial struggle, and liberation from economic exploitation and violent oppression. Including urgent, on-the-ground accounts of revolutionary movements (HAITI: THE WAY...

As a writer-director, producer, and creator of THE SOPRANOS, David Chase has left an indelible imprint on popular culture, revolutionizing the art of television by bringing a boldly cinematic sensibility to the small screen. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, he sits down with crime-fic...

The visually mesmerizing and deeply reflective films of Kimi Takesue traverse genres—including documentary, fiction, and experimental forms—to explore the charged spaces between observer and observed. Often centered on the act of travel, Takesue’s work follows tourists and locals as they navigate...

Flowing freely between documentary and performance, the richly impressionistic films of brothers Bill and Turner Ross are wonders of regional American filmmaking made according to an unwavering philosophy: to be completely present in the moment and alive to the ecstatic humanity that passes befor...

Composed in stark, black-and-white images of working-class poetry that have the elemental power of silent cinema, these three works by Bill Douglas are among the most miraculous achievements of British independent film. Based on Douglas’s own hardscrabble upbringing in a postwar Scottish mining v...

Scandal, corruption, and high-stakes power struggles play out amid imposing high-rises and glassy boardrooms in these sleekly tailored tales of office intrigue and money-hungry machinations. In the years between 1987’s Black Monday stock-market crash and 2008’s global financial meltdown, Wall Str...

A master of mood, shadow, and dreamy ambiguity, French-born director Jacques Tourneur brought a sophisticated subtlety to his celebrated work in Hollywood. His command of atmosphere and darkly poetic sensibility were particularly suited to film noir, as seen in this trio of stylish, chiaroscuro-e...

Following her blistering debut feature, YEAST (featuring a breakthrough performance by a young Greta Gerwig), Mary Bronstein directed Rose Byrne to an Academy Award nomination in her emotionally stunning maternal maelstrom IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, B...

A self-described “Marxist among capitalists,” documentarian Emile de Antonio wielded the camera as a weapon in his fight against America’s corrupt power structures and the Cold War establishment elite. Unabashedly aligning himself with the leftist movements of the 1960s and ’70s in contrast to th...

Boundary-breaking filmmakers reclaim their stories with these richly varied looks at the trans experience. Long misrepresented on-screen through disreputable and actively harmful images, trans characters have come into focus thanks to a pioneering generation of trans directors determined to captu...