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...

A unique and blazing talent, Bob Hoskins was one of the most versatile and consistently riveting actors Britain ever produced. “Five-foot-six cubic” in his own words, Hoskins combined a brawny physicality with a vast emotional range, leading to a series of indelible performances: as a beleaguered...

Celebrating its sixtieth edition this fall, the New York Film Festival is a cornerstone of American film culture, introducing U.S. audiences to some of the most exciting films from around the world for six decades running. This selection of some of the festival’s greatest hits stretches back to i...

Utilizing fractured editing, cacophonous sound design, and a whole lot of (possibly imaginary) cats, Lori Felker’s DISCONTINUITY brilliantly evokes the rapidly escalating pileup of interruptions, incongruities, and absurdities that arise when a long-term couple reunite after an extended separatio...

In 1979, poet Adrienne Rich observed that “one of the most powerful social and political catalysts of the past decade has been the speaking of women with other women, the telling of our secrets, the comparing of wounds and sharing of words.” Curated by guest programmer Nellie Killian, Tell Me cel...

Intense, handsome, and gifted with a rare capacity for conveying inner turmoil and doubt, Jean-Louis Trintignant was one of the greatest actors of European art-house cinema, bringing intelligence and passion to carefully crafted performances in a number of all-time classics. After early success a...

Overlooked for too long, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925–1987) should be seen as one of the most important and influential figures in the development of African cinema. Born in Benin and later based in Senegal, Vieyra was one of the first Black Africans to direct a film, AFRICA ON THE SEINE, a movin...

When the 1968 edition of the Cannes Film Festival opened amid widespread civil unrest, filmmakers began pulling their movies from the schedule in solidarity with the workers and students protesting across France. This series gathers select titles from the year’s official lineup, alongside a scene...

Hailed for her vibrant explorations of culture clash and connection in films like MONSOON WEDDING and MISSISSIPPI MASALA, Indian American auteur Mira Nair has pursued an equally distinguished career as a director of short films that further explore the ways in which deep-rooted cultural tradition...

French director Jacques Demy didn’t just make movies—he created an entire cinematic world. Demy launched his glorious feature filmmaking career in the sixties, a decade of astonishing invention in his national cinema. He stood out from the crowd of his fellow New Wavers, however, by filtering his...

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...

These exuberant and inventive Oscar-nominated shorts span animated, documentary, and fiction work, including eye-catching early films by Andrea Arnold, Richard Lester, and Shirley Clarke. At an awards show often dominated by stars and industry titans, the short-film Academy Award categories tend ...

Shocking, confrontational, and made with white-hot fury, these radical documentaries—directed by Kazuo Hara and produced by his wife and longtime creative partner, Sachiko Kobayashi—give voice to the outsiders and iconoclasts who wage war with the conformism of modern Japanese society. From a wom...

No one makes movies like Claire Denis, one of contemporary cinema’s foremost masters. Raised in colonial West Africa, Denis apprenticed as an assistant to Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders before striking out on her own in the late eighties in an entirely original cinematic language shaped by her outs...

Emerging from the freakiest fringes of the 1960s counterculture, Robert Downey Sr. took the American underground cinema by storm with his wild, weird, and way-out-there send-ups of everything from sex to race relations to religion. In this tribute to one of his filmmaking heroes, acclaimed cinema...

Environmental-art superstar Christo, who passed away in May this year, and his longtime collaborator, Jeanne-Claude, transformed the world’s landscapes into epic canvases for their awe-inspiring site-specific installations. Though their staggering achievements—including an enormous curtain hung b...

The boy wonder who became the great, wandering titan of international cinema, writer-director-actor and all-around force of nature Orson Welles began his filmmaking career with some of the most dazzling and innovative opuses ever made within the Hollywood studio system—but his vision was always t...

Just as postwar disillusionment infiltrated American pop culture and found its way to Hollywood in the form of film noir, so it did in Japan, where a wave of edgy, existential crime dramas spread like a shadow across the Land of the Rising Sun. With STRAY DOG, Akira Kurosawa applied the chiaroscu...

Directed by John Lurie • 1992 • United States

John Lurie knows absolutely nothing about fishing, but that doesn’t stop him from undertaking the adventure of a lifetime in FISHING WITH JOHN. Traveling with his special guests to the most exotic and dangerous places on earth, John Lurie battles sha...

Creative Marriages

When Ingmar Bergman cast Liv Ullmann in PERSONA, he initiated a remarkable creative partnership that would last well beyond the passionate, years-long affair that also blossomed between them.

A titan of the American cinema who emerged from the ranks of the 1970s movie brats with his era-defining screenplay for TAXI DRIVER, writer-director Paul Schrader has pursued a defiantly singular vision in his provocative explorations of guilt and salvation in a soul-sick world. In this original ...

SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE chronicles the many years of love and turmoil that bind Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson) through matrimony, infidelity, divorce, and subsequent partners. Shot in intense, intimate close-ups by master cinematographer Sven Nykvist and featuring flawless per...

With their blend of earthiness and dreamlike surrealism, the films of Federico Fellini dominated mid-twentieth-century art-house cinema. Though he began his career as a screenwriter for the neorealist titan Roberto Rossellini, Fellini quickly developed his own personal, poetic style in early triu...