In the AI-drenched bizarro world that is 2024, the premise of Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, released 20 years ago this spring,…
Stan Brakhage’s 1958 film Anticipation of the Night could perhaps be likened to the late-19th and early-20th century tonal compositions of Arnold Schoenberg. In works…
There comes a time when you just can’t swallow the bitter pill of reality; you have to crush it up, mix it in with some…
I have clear memories of watching Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009) as a pre-teen. The spring and summertime passages of the film are most prominent…
As the 1950s progressed, Nicholas Ray found himself in an increasingly precarious, even fraught relationship with filmmaking. He directed 14 films in 10 years, a…
Millennium Mambo, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2001 romantic drama, premiered at that year’s Cannes Film Festival where it received a rather muted response, even from admirers of…
The great director Paul W.S. Anderson expressed irritation in his commentary track on Alien vs. Predator (2004) to the common descriptor used to label films…
When High and Low was released in 1963, Akira Kurosawa had been working his way through some of the world’s great literary works for quite…
Engagement with Yasujirō Ozu’s work often prompts descriptors like “restrained,” “artisanal,” or even “conservative,” and appraisals of his films regularly point to their stubborn minimalism…
Michelangelo Antonioni’s endlessly digressive Blow-Up (1966), the Italian director’s first of four films produced outside his home country, features a particular digression that links it directly to…
When was the last time you visited a foreign city and didn’t look up things to do? Didn’t crowd-source recommendations, rely on offline maps and…
Following the success and acclaim of his reality-bending 1997 directorial debut Perfect Blue — a feverish take on the Giallo genre, filtered through a ’90s…
In Johnny Guitar, Nicholas Ray’s phantasmagorical 1954 Western, it takes fewer than two minutes for a deafening explosion of dynamite to ring out. The detonation…
At first glance, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence seems to exist in opposition to its creator’s body of work. Directed and co-written by Nagisa Ôshima, an…
Few directors have embodied the ethos of their own films quite so fully as Robert Aldrich; fiercely independent, constantly navigating the fickle vicissitudes of a…
Few directors have had a run of films as impressive as Abel Ferrara managed in the 1990s. In total, he released eight features during the…
“Only Minnelli believes implicitly in the power of his camera to transform trash into art, and corn into caviar. Minnelli believes more in beauty than…
Experience really can make all the difference: Samuel Fuller’s films could only have come from a real-life war veteran, and Bull Durham could only have…
The history of the Western is fertile territory for studying many of the greatest American filmmakers of the 20th century. While none worked exclusively in…