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 Whoopi Goldberg (GHOST) who received some of their greatest acclai...

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 ...

The cultural dynamism, iconic landmarks, and anything-can-happen energy of New York City have provided the vibrant backdrop to some of the most indelible love stories ever told on-screen. Reflecting the ever-changing face of the city from the 1970s through the 2000s, this selection of heart-racin...