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...

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...

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...

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...

Argentina gave rise to some of the finest and most fascinating crime thrillers of the postwar noir boom—pitch-black tales of lust, greed, guilt, and deception suffused with the passionate intensity of tango and sculpted in striking expressionist shadows. This selection of newly restored films fro...

One of the greatest American filmmakers to emerge in the 1970s, Joan Micklin Silver drew on her background as the daughter of Russian-born Jewish parents to write and direct beautifully bittersweet portraits of women, immigrants, and marginalized communities. With profound empathy, her films vivi...

A director of such distinctive, overpowering vision that he inspired his own adjective, David Lynch made films that seemed telegraphed straight from his unconscious to the screen. From the unsettling surrealist imagery of his midnight-movie classic ERASERHEAD to the harrowing suburban nightmare T...

Stop me if you think you’ve seen this one before . . . Cinema has an inherent ability to reshape time and, in the hands of a master filmmaker, temporality itself can become a unique means of immersive, brain-rewiring storytelling. Featuring looping timelines, fragmented memories, and alternate “b...

Shattering taboos with her unflinching, often shocking explorations of female sexuality and pleasure, Catherine Breillat plunges fearlessly into the corporeal realms of eroticism and violence. The two are inextricably linked in her daring body of work, which encompasses controversial coming-of-ag...

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...

Hong Kong is home to one of the world’s most exciting pop-filmmaking traditions—and there’s no bigger event in its box-office calendar than Lunar New Year, typically reserved for the industry’s most crowd-pleasing releases. These genre-blending touchstones bring audiences together for an escape i...

With his lush and sensual visuals, pitch-perfect soundtracks, and soulful romanticism, Wong Kar Wai has established himself as one of the defining auteurs of contemporary cinema. Joined by such key collaborators as cinematographer Christopher Doyle; editor and production and costume designer Will...

Cofounded by former Beatle George Harrison in 1978, the storied production studio and distribution company HandMade Films gave new life to British cinema in the 1980s, taking chances on risky projects and first-time directors to bring audiences future classics like THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY, WITHNAIL ...

For five decades, Alfred Hitchcock explored our innermost anxieties, desires, and obsessions in his diabolically constructed thrillers, which redefined the mechanics of screen terror through meticulous editing, voyeuristic camera work, and unforgettable set pieces. In endlessly studied and imitat...

Yasujiro Ozu was Japanese cinema’s great poet of everyday life, and, 120 years after his birth, he remains one of the most significant film artists who ever lived. From the late 1920s to the early ’60s, Ozu explored the rhythms and tensions of a country trying to reconcile modern and traditional ...

“If Africans do not tell their own stories, Africa will soon disappear,” declared Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese cinematic revolutionary whose career-long project to illuminate the lives of the marginalized made him the continent’s most influential and widely acclaimed director. A manual laborer...

A singular, iconoclastic artist, Robert Bresson left behind an astonishing body of work, defined by the search for what he called “not beautiful images, but necessary images.” In a long, visionary career that began in the 1940s and ended in the 1980s, he continually refined the strict precision o...

Images of unforgettable terror and strange beauty exist side by side in these darkly imaginative works that fuse genre chills with formal innovation. Tapping into horror’s potential to manifest our subconscious fears, visionary directors like David Lynch (ERASERHEAD), Dario Argento (SUSPIRIA), an...

In the latest edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, Queens-born filmmaker and famously delightful raconteur James Gray (TWO LOVERS, ARMAGEDDON TIME) discusses his filmic education courtesy of New York’s vibrant repertory cinemas and the formative discoveries that shaped his uniquely intelligent ap...

Hal Hartley is a true independent, boasting one of the most idiosyncratic bodies of work in all of contemporary cinema. First emerging in the late 1980s and early ’90s with a fully formed sensibility on display in the barbed romantic comedies THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH and TRUST, he quickly became on...

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...

They’re undead, unstoppable, and hopping mad! Meet the bouncing, bloodsucking stars of Hong Kong’s most outrageous martial-arts horror comedies. Far removed from the suave vampires of Western mythology, these zombie fiends, derived from Taoist folklore, are distinguished by their deathly pallor a...

Take a European vacation full of danger, suspense, and surprise with some of the most stylish, nerve-twisting films ever to make their way across the pond. There’s murder on the Mediterranean (PURPLE NOON), mystery in the Land of the Midnight Sun (INSOMNIA), paranoia among the shadows of Prague (...