During the 1840s, six settlers and their guide are caught in a dangerous situation: They are lost, food and water are running out, and the surrounding desert threatens to claim them all. Meanwhile, their guide, Stephen Meek (an unrecognizable Bruce Greenwood), refuses to acknowledge that they may be several weeks off-course. When a Native American […]

Sayles’s masterful film—novelistic in its intricacy and featuring a brilliant ensemble cast, including Joe Morton, Elizabeth Peña, Matthew McConaughey, and Kris Kristofferson—quietly subverts national mythmaking and lays bare the fault lines of life at the border. A keen observer of America’s social fabric, writer-director John Sayles uncovers the haunted past buried beneath a small Texas […]

In this captivating and philosophical film directed by Louis Malle, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with his friend the theater director André Gregory at a restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side. The pair proceed through an alternately whimsical and despairing confessional about love, death, money, and all the superstition in between, playing […]

Ousmane Sembène, often called “the father of African film,” was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the twentieth century—and yet his name still deserves to be better known in the rest of the world. Black Girl, Sembène’s debut and one of […]

When Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually bonkers masterpiece to the executives at his studio, he was promptly fired. This was probably inevitable for a too-cool renegade artist who gleefully embraced and sent up his “B-movie hack” rep within a ruthlessly efficient assembly-line studio system. Suzuki’s genre ambivalence […]

Live improvised score by Matt Hagen + Mike Fried Ernst Lubitsch directed some of Hollywood’s greatest comedies—Trouble in Paradise (1932), Ninotchka (1939), and To Be or Not to Be (1942) among them—but made some of his best films early in his career in his native Germany. Take, for instance, The Wildcat (Die Bergkatze), a madcap […]

Mira Nair’s first narrative feature, the Oscar-nominated Salaam Bombay!, is a kaleidoscopic portrait of India’s most populous city, now called Mumbai. Teeming street life is captured with documentary-like sense of place, coupled with Nair’s compassionate neo-realism as she explores tales of everyday resilience on the margins. After the young Krishna (Shafiq Syed) is cast out […]

Mira Nair’s exuberant Monsoon Wedding, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival, mixes comedy and chaotic melodrama in the maelstrom of an upscale wedding in New Delhi. Aditi, the only daughter in a traditional upper-middle-class Indian family, is getting married. Of course there are hitches: Aditi has been having an affair […]