The author of “The Feral Detective” on a lifetime of moviegoing

Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger • 1945 • United Kingdom
Starring Wendy Hiller, Roger Livesey

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s stunningly photographed comedy, romance flourishes in an unlikely place—the bleak and moody Scottish Hebrides. Wendy Hiller stars as a headstr...

Directed by Georges Franju • 1960 • France
Starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, François Guérin

At his secluded chateau in the French countryside, a brilliant, obsessive doctor (Pierre Brasseur) attempts a radical plastic surgery to restore the beauty of his daughter’s disfigured countenance—a...

Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1968 • Sweden
Starring Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow

Directed by Ingmar Bergman, SHAME (SKAMMEN) is at once an examination of the violent legacy of World War II and a scathing response to the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam. Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann star as m...

Directed by Orson Welles • 1975 • France, Iran, Germany

Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In F FOR FAKE, a free-form sort-of documentary by Orson Welles, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully reengages with the central preoccupation of his career: the tenuous lines between illu...

Directed by John Cassavetes • 1977 • United States
Starring Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara

While in the midst of rehearsals for her latest play, Broadway actor Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) witnesses the accidental death of an adoring young fan, after which she begins to confront th...

Directed by David Cronenberg • 1981 • Canada
Starring Stephen Lack, Jennifer O’Neill, Michael Ironside

With SCANNERS, David Cronenberg plunges us into one of his most terrifying and thrilling sci-fi worlds. After a man with extraordinary—and frighteningly destructive—telepathic abilities is nabb...

Directed by David Gordon Green • 2000 • United States
Starring Candace Evanofski, Donald Holden, Damien Jewan Lee

Over the course of one hot summer, a group of children in the decaying rural South must confront a tangle of difficult choices. An ambitiously constructed, elegantly photographed med...