Film

Seijun Suzuki was a maverick of Japanese cinema who served as the antithesis that noir should inherently be rooted in the real world. Though he was a company man for Nikkatsu, it was his tempestuous collaborations with the production studio that inadvertently birthed one of Japan’s most bold anti-establishment auteurs—a playful renegade with a knack for the absurd.

The Swedish director discusses Crossing, an undulating tale of a retired Georgian woman's search for her trans niece in Istanbul.

Filmmaker Isabel Sandoval explores the crossroads between desire and memory in the cinema of Wong Kar-wai, particularly his 1990 film Days of Being Wild.

Although Duras is better known as a writer, having written 50 books throughout her career, her filmmaking was similarly groundbreaking and prolific. Cici Peng explores the aesthetics of Duras's filmic images, defined by their haunting negativity and relation to the unrepresentable.

A Yorgos Lanthimos film isn’t a Yorgos Lanthimos film without a strange and jaunty jig. A result of TikTok aesthetics, in recent years the trope of off-kilter choreography has reached far wider than the Greek auteur, says Alex Denney.

Agnieszka Holland discusses Green Border, a dramatisation of the migration crisis on the Belarus-European Union border, staged from the perspective of refugees and border guards.

One of the most significant actors in French film history, Jeanne Moreau made her name playing alluring but troubled heroines. Whilst the term femme fatale followed Moreau to the grave, Kitty Grady explores how Moreau brought a more nuanced definition to the age-old archetype, one that coincided with the birth of the French New Wave.

The acclaimed director discusses his latest feature Hit Man—an ingenious fusion of noir and screwball that continues his exploration of time, identity and human malleability.

Gilda greeted the first Cannes Film Festival audience with a new type of morally ambiguous story, becoming a definitive example of film noir—complete with its iconic Rita Hayworth performance. In this essay, Peter Bradshaw explores the love story in which hate is the biggest aphrodisiac.

The composer discusses how he created the soaring but sensitive sonic world of Furiosa, the second installment in George Miller’s Mad Max franchise.