A sui generis icon of counterculture cinema and style, John Waters upends traditional notions of “good taste” and heteronormative social conventions with a gleefully transgressive mix of camp humor, outrageous provocation, and daring empathy. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, he sits d...

The great prickly humanist of British cinema, Mike Leigh has forged a body of work unique in its concern for the struggles of ordinary people and the social fabric of working-class London. Famously born from a process of extensive improvisation with his powerhouse actors, Leigh’s films inhabit a ...

In the early 1930s—when the censorial Hollywood Production Code wasn’t yet enforced and sex, sin, and sleaze were splashed across the screen with abandon—Columbia Pictures was distinguished by the working-class, populist milieu of their productions, which stood in contrast to the polished, escapi...

Steeped in Irish history and lore, the films of Dónal Foreman are searching, shape-shifting explorations of place, cultural memory, and national identity. Working across narrative, documentary, and experimental practices, his three features to date—the vivid Dublin-set youth portrait OUT OF HERE,...

Originator of the hugely popular ZATOICHI and LONE WOLF AND CUB franchises, Kenji Misumi was a master of the chanbara (“sword fighting”) genre who brought thrilling stylistic flourishes and unique psychological and emotional depth to his many classic films. Among his finest achievements, the thre...

Of all the cinematic New Waves that broke over the world in the 1960s, the one in Czechoslovakia was among the most fruitful, fascinating, and radical. With a wicked sense of humor and a healthy streak of surrealism, a group of fearless directors—including Miloš Forman (THE FIREMEN’S BALL), Vera ...

Queerness simmers beneath the surface of classical Hollywood noir, with its heightened ambiguity, shadowy identities, and free-floating sensuality. Made during the era of the Production Code, which banned “any inference of sex perversion,” these films, with their characters’ murky pasts and murki...

Though best known as one of American cinema’s greatest live-wire actors, John Turturro has carved out a rich parallel career making highly personal, emotionally complicated films stamped with his own uncompromising vision. Built around committed performances from powerhouse ensemble casts, his fi...

To celebrate the release of his acclaimed latest, EMILIA PÉREZ, we’re revisiting the intense, visceral films of French auteur Jacques Audiard, whose masterful crime dramas infuse genre conventions with new freshness through their empathetic focus on the marginalized and oppressed. From his early ...

Dedicated to supporting documentary storytellers whose voices have long been marginalized within the film industry, IF/Then Shorts breaks down barriers to access, exposure, and funding in the media landscape. To date, IF/Then has been instrumental in bringing more than fifty projects from across ...

Whether you’re just getting started on your journey into film noir’s dark world of glamorous femme fatales and down-on-their-luck average Joes, interested in exploring new avenues, or just want to rewatch your favorites, there’s no better time of year to soak in the atmosphere of Hollywood’s shad...

Following in the footsteps of his revered documentarian father, Les Blank, Harrod Blank makes films that immerse viewers in the offbeat subcultures and proudly unconventional fringes of American society. A leading figure in the art-car community explored in WILD WHEELS and AUTOMORPHOSIS—both abou...

This fright-night double bill of ripe-for-rediscovery ’70s TV gems brings together the tense stalker thriller SOMEONE’S WATCHING ME, directed with ruthless efficiency by genre master John Carpenter, and the Carrie-esque telekinesis shocker THE SPELL, featuring an unforgettable performance from Le...

The boldly transgressive films of Stephanie Rothman use the conventions of low-budget exploitation cinema to cannily subvert patriarchal systems and the male gaze. Beginning her career as an assistant to Roger Corman, she made the leap to director at his newly formed production company New World ...

Director of both the first American feature-length documentary by and about LGBTQ+ people (GAY USA) and the first feature-length drama about AIDS (BUDDIES), intrepid filmmaker Arthur J. Bressan Jr. brought images of queer struggle, joy, pain, love, and liberation to the screen with a humanity and...

With his very first film ON THE BOWERY, Lionel Rogosin forever changed the art of nonfiction filmmaking in America, bridging narrative and documentary practices to portray life on New York’s skid row with an unvarnished authenticity and immediacy steeped in the spirit of neorealism. Born one hund...

Born one hundred years ago this September, Marcello Mastroianni made being a movie star look effortless, wearing his suave good looks and worldly sophistication with a sly, self-deprecating lightness that was perhaps only matched by his American counterpart, Cary Grant. Though he will forever be ...

Simmering with outrage and biting irony, the slashingly subversive films of French-Martinican writer-director Julius-Amédée Laou carry on the legacy of his compatriot Frantz Fanon, giving blistering expression to the experience of postcolonial systemic racism in France. Though he is most famous a...

To mark the release of his acclaimed new drama HIS THREE DAUGHTERS, we’re revisiting the films of Azazel Jacobs, who has been quietly crafting some of the funniest, tenderest, and most winningly offbeat works in the last two decades of American independent cinema. Poignant stories of outsiders an...

Gena Rowlands forever changed the face of screen acting with her raw emotional realism and immersive approach to performance, which blurred the lines between actor and character to the point of no return. Fearlessly exploring the extreme edges of human relationships and emotion in films like the ...

Once the sound of the future, now awesomely retro, synth soundtracks add a splash of otherworldly atmosphere to some of the coolest movies ever made. Using state-of-the-art analog and digital technologies, pioneering musicians like Sun Ra (SPACE IS THE PLACE) and Ryuichi Sakamoto (MERRY CHRISTMAS...

The beautiful boy of French cinema whose steely, ice-blue gaze betrayed more than a hint of danger, Alain Delon was a favorite of modernists like Luchino Visconti, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Michelangelo Antonioni, all of whom were seduced by his impossible good looks and air of cool detachment. T...

Following a nine-year absence from the screen, the King of the Monsters roared back with a vengeance in 1984 with THE RETURN OF GODZILLA, inaugurating a new era in the romping reptile’s mythology. The ferociously entertaining kaiju spectaculars of the 1980s and ’90s—which brought back familiar fa...

For more than half a century, Youssef Chahine drew from the multicultural, cosmopolitan spirit of his home city of Alexandria to forge a passionate, extravagant, iconoclastic oeuvre that merged a quintessentially Egyptian sensibility with international influences ranging from Hollywood musicals a...