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...

On the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, filmmaker and program curator Tony Bui presents a multiperspective look at the Vietnam War on film, moving beyond conventional narratives to include voices and viewpoints often overlooked in mainstream cinema. While the most famous Vietnam War fi...

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...

Noir was never part of mainland China’s literary or cinematic lexicon until relatively recently, when a new wave of gripping, boldly stylized thrillers took up the genre’s conventions—gritty narratives, morally complex characters, and pervasive disillusionment—as a lens for potent social commenta...

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...

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...

Specializing in tender, sensitive explorations of queer and Asian identity, writer-director Ray Yeung has carved out a unique place in contemporary Hong Kong cinema to tell intimate stories of gay love finding a way in the face of repression and prejudice. Shot in New York City, FRONT COVER is a ...

One of the most exciting and adventurous film festivals to emerge in recent years, Prismatic Ground brings together aesthetically innovative, politically radical work at the intersection of experimental and documentary cinema. This selection of shorts from the festival’s first four editions offer...

This awards season, we pay homage to the virtuoso secondary players who ran away with their movies, nabbing Oscar gold when the lead actors they so memorably supported did not. From stars like Kevin Kline (A FISH CALLED WANDA) and Lee Grant (SHAMPOO) who received some of their greatest acclaim in...

Thirty years ago, a group of filmmakers led by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg issued a provocative manifesto for a new avant-garde. Demanding that adherents take a series of “vows of chastity,” the movement known as Dogme 95 sought to liberate filmmaking from genre conventions and stylistic...

Whether they’re neonoir thrillers or gripping historical dramas, the films of Michael Mann pulsate with visual adrenaline. Through a propulsive fusion of image, sound, and movement, he creates worlds that feel both heightened and intimately real, with light- and color-saturated frames, unforgetta...

Though best known today for his scorching 1950s melodramas, Douglas Sirk’s subversive sensibility and powers as a baroque visual stylist also served him well in the sinister world of noir. Trading lavish Technicolor for deep, black-and-white expressionist shadows, this trio of atmospheric thrille...

FEATURING A NEW INTRODUCTION BY CRITIC IMOGEN SARA SMITH

Moody, shadow-latticed cinematography; exquisitely wrought dialogue; an intoxicating sense of world-weary fatalism: welcome to the world of French cinema in the 1930s and ’40s, when the style known as poetic realism—rooted in working-class...

To mark the release of his acclaimed latest, MISERICORDIA, we’re revisiting the daring, dreamlike, darkly comic, and defiantly queer films of director Alain Guiraudie, who has carved out a distinctive place within French cinema through his transgressive explorations of sex, desire, death, and ali...

A writer turned director whose literary background lends his films their novelistic weight, South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong has made some of the most searching and emotionally devastating works in contemporary cinema. Suffused with all the beauty, pain, and tension of real life, his films look...

In their urgent and empathetic documentaries, husband-and-wife team Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson explore issues of identity, injustice, and activist resistance in the Black diaspora. From AMERICAN PROMISE, an intimate chronicle of two Black boys (one their own son) navigating the pitfalls ...