Bad Lieutenant, Directed by Abel Ferrara, 1992

Inherent Vice and the Dual Soul of the California Ideology Many have speculated that the Inherent Vice’s narrator Sortilège (Joanna Newsom), is not an actual flesh and blood being, but rather an incar...

Akira Kurosawa’s place in the cannon is so secure that it is easy to take him for granted. He is best remembered for samurai epics set in Japan’s feudal past but High and Low is a skillfully made adap...

My Neighbor Totoro is quietly subversive for the way it depicts a world without villains or the strains of violence typically found in both Western and Japanese animation. Hayao Miyazaki eschews formu...

With the possible exception of Roy Andersson's The Living trilogy, no directors oeuvre feels more like the end of the world than the work of Bela Tarr. Satantango is essentially a cathedral to moral d...

In the absence of meaning we wrestle with identity, but what if there is no self? Perhaps our personas are mental projections made up of our hopes and fears. The idea of a fractured self sounds schizo...

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The line three hamburgers no garbage on them is worth the price of admission alone. Director Barbara Loden's Wanda challenges our assumptions of what type of people can be the subject of the stories w...

Perhaps the greatest film of all time, but too heart wrenching to watch regularly. In Sansho the Bailiff humanist ideals are challenged by a cruel world. Brutal practices such as slavery and having on...

Young director Bernardo Bertolucci's time as a disciple of Pier Pasolini and Sergio Leone, along with Italian cinema's openness to experimentation certainly aided his ability to create this highly sty...

"Color consultants" working for Technicolor used to advise, or rather yet, regulate how filmmakers could stylize their films, preferring a more natural look--but directors Powell and Pressburger went ...

M is a film with no central protagonist and rather it presents a story about a single antagonist versus society's systems of justice. Director Fritz Lang built the essential tropes of both the police ...

Robert Bresson's L'Argent is a clear influence on Richard Linklater's Slacker, specifically in its episodic nature, schematic structure and use of interconnected characters. There is no central protag...

This loose adaption of Tolstoy's "The Forged Coupon" follows a minor act of forgery that creates an avalanche of spiritual malaise, destroying innocent lives in the process and exposing the capitalist...

An essential work to understanding the DNA of American independent film. Like Bresson and Ozu, Jarmusch favors simplicity and purity. He took inspiration from the DIY ethos of punk rock, and particula...

A new color TV set bought on credit transmits dire news from around the world to a couple's apartment--it's detached nature, representing the mediated world makes us feel pacified to the gargantuan sy...

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant tells the story of a domineering and successful fashion designer Petra( Margit Carstensen) who desperately falls for a younger model Karin( Hanna Schygulla) who does...

A German new wave classic largely set in America. Stroszek tells the story of a man named Bruno( Bruno S.) who is released from prison and barely makes a living as a street musician playing the glocke...

Deep End makes other coming of age stories look formulaic. Set in London, but largely filmed in Munich, the film centers on a teenage boy Micheal( John Moulder Brown) who develops an infatuation that ...

Vivre Sa Vie tells the story of Nana ( Anna Karina) a Parisian record store clerk and mother desiring fame from acting but whose life falls apart into prostitution and poverty after her marriage unrav...

This humorous film inventively blurs the lines of the mockumentary and bio-pic genre with the combination of fictionalized elements, dramatizations of rumors and urban legends, meta-commentary, and th...

Mike Leigh's Naked depicts a post-Thatcher Britain inhabited by pale pasty faced individuals subsisting on the welfare state who lack families, relationships, homes, and jobs. Their only possessions s...

A Brighter Summer Day has the novelistic richness of character and setting of a Tolstoy novel. Edward Yang renders Taiwan’s militarized culture with a slow culmination of details, capturing the the ex...

With the possible exception of Roy Andersson's the Living trilogy, no film feels more like the end of the world than Satantago. The film captures a muddy and rain soaked world of moral despair. Based ...

James Bond meets 1984 with the absurdity of Kafka. This 1960s British cult classic follows the kidnapping of secret agent Number Six( Patrick McGoohan) and his imprisonment on an undisclosed coastal V...

"Are You Allergic to the 20th Century"? Safe creates a frisson within the spectator by transforming the mundane into something uncanny and deeply disturbing. Static long shots allow the scenes to brea...

David Cronenberg has continuously and unflinchingly explored what it means to be human. In Videodrome all of his major themes are present: technology as an extension of both the mind and physicality, ...

Rather than using a traditional score, this Cold War saga focusing on the rise and fall of Carlos ‘the Jackal’ Ramirez heavily features post-punk songs from the 70s and 80s to not only mark transition...

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Apparently, in 1966 this film haunted Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys so bad that he did not attend another movie theater until 1982's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was released. Wilson arrived at the the...

This existential and epistemological thriller works as a parable about modern terrorism, xenophobia, and colonial guilt from France's conquests in Algeria. The opening shot of the film displays an ext...

Ironically, the movie opens with the image of a man in a tanning bed, and I say ironically because the rest of the inhabitants of this world are so ghostly white that they look like they are zombies w...

Jacques Tati meticulously constructed an expensive citywide set (a character in it's own right) on the outskirts of Paris to create this leisurely paced, whimsical, and visually brilliant film that wo...

Jean-Pierre Melville( a hero of the French Resistance) and Sergio Leone similarly reconstructed American genre films through a highly stylized European lens--transforming pulp fiction into high art. L...

Elevator to the Galllows is a sly but clear commentary on France's colonial involvement in Algeria and Indochina and the moral rot of contemporary France. This innovative and essential noir and precur...

John Huston's adaptation of Flannery O'Conner's Wise Blood prefigures the regionalism, dark humor, gothic violence, and the spiritual inquiries of the grotesque and flawed individuals of the Coen brot...

Ivan Passer's neo-noir Cutter's Way is one of the best films of the 1980s but it really belongs to the 1970s cinema of paranoia and dread like Klute, Winter Kills, Chinatown, Night Moves, Nashville, T...

Richard Lester's "Petulia" belongs alongside Antonioni’s “Eclipse” and Resnais’ “Last Year at Marienbad" for exposing the soul sickness, impatience, and every day irritation of modern life. A relative...