The first half-century of American cinema is almost perfectly contiguous with the life of Jim Crow, and parallels the brutal wave of imperialist expansion that kicked off with the Spanish-American war.

More successfully than the now countless others that have tried, Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 is a film that eludes succinct description. Every level of the film’s text, and every moment in the history of the film, has been animated by an adamant preference for circulation over transmission, flow over fixity.

For 17 years, Views from the Avant-Garde, a sidebar program to the New York Film Festival, was the United States’s defining institution for the locus of films and videos that constitute what we still, half-heartedly, call the avant-garde.

I am too young to have ever known an avant-garde with a future. The 10 years during which I have paid serious attention to experimental film have unfolded as an extended funeral procession after the death of cinema.

When a film is called “didactic,” it is most often intended either as an insult or as a way of bolstering a work’s particular theoretical ambitions. Thom Andersen’s resolutely nonfictional films are didactic in a richer, more specific sense.

There are a few things that everybody knows about Richard Pryor: that he lit himself on fire in a suicide attempt while freebasing cocaine; that his stand-up revolutionized the form and altered the terms of American race relations; and that the movies he made were, for the most part, very bad.

Hong Sang-soo’s best films leave your retinas imprinted with a luminous clarity.

Melanie Gilligan’s Popular Unrest (2010) opened this year’s Migrating Forms with a pointed set of questions: Is it relevant to render human stories in a traditional moving-image format? (Arguably not.) Can a movie portray the abstractions of capital amidst an increasingly global, savage monetarization of physical life?

Whether by design or circumstance, this June has become Thai Cinema Month in New York, with an array of the city’s art houses and museums boasting otherwise hard-to-see gems from the Thai film renaissance that began in the late 1990s.

Whether by design or circumstance, this June has become Thai Cinema Month in New York, with an array of the city’s art houses and museums boasting otherwise hard-to-see gems from the Thai film renaissance that began in the late 1990s.

This year’s edition of New Directors/New Films, presented annually by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society at Lincoln Center, marks the festival’s 40th anniversary.

Gilded in the Palme d’Or, and spittle-flecked by word of mouth, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives arrives in New York to colossal expectations. Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest feature, his sixth, is more than capable of meeting them.