North America, Central America

Known as the celebrated director of critical and commercial successes such as Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963), Alfred Hitchcock is famous for his distinctive visual style and signature motifs. Whi …

A refugee from post–World War II Europe who immigrated to the US in 1949, Jonas Mekas (1922–2019) became one of America’s foremost champions of independent cinema and one of its most innovative filmm …

An absorbing portrait of a groundbreaking Black woman filmmaker. Kathleen Collins (1942–88) was a visionary and influential Black filmmaker. Beginning with her short film The Cruz Brothers …

In the late 1950s, Mike Nichols (1931–2014) and Elaine May (b. 1932) soared to superstar status as a sketch comedy duo in live shows and television. After their 1962 breakup, both went on to long and …

In 1971, Newsweek heralded The Last Picture Show as ‘the most impressive work by a young American director since Citizen Kane.’ Indeed, few filmmakers rivaled Peter Bogdanovich’s popularity over the …

Animated by a singularly subversive spirit, the fiendishly intelligent works of Stuart Gordon (1947–2020) are distinguished by their arrant boldness and scab-picking wit. Provocative gems such as Re- …

Among the most innovative and influential filmmakers of the twentieth century, Alain Resnais (1922–2014) did not originally set out to become a director. He trained as an actor and film editor and, d …

The films made by the British Instructional Films (BIF) company in the decade following the end of the First World War helped to shape the way in which that war was remembered. This is both a work of …

Beginning with his first film Reconstruction, released in 1970, Theo Angelopoulos’s notoriously complex cinematic language has long explored Greece’s contemporary history and questioned European cult …

Rogue filmmaker Robert Rodriguez (b. 1968) rocketed to fame with his ultra-low-budget film El Mariachi (1992). The Spanish-language action film, and the making-of book that accompanied it, were inspi …