It’s no accident that Citizen Kane has been named the Greatest Movie of All Time by numerous groups, and in a way, the legend has become an albatross. But here’s the thing: Citizen Kane is a joy-ride, an absolute delight, about as much fun as you can have watching a movie.

Frequently credited with launching the Black film movement known as Blaxploitation in 1971, Gordon Parks’ Shaft  was a surprise smash-hit, as was Isaac Hayes’ fantastic score and Oscar-winning title track with its iconic wah-wah riff.

Blending remarkable performances from its stacked ensemble cast with director Jim Jarmusch’s wry and idiosyncratic observations, Father Mother Sister Brother—which won the Golden Lion this year in Venice—is an intimate exploration of the universal intricacies of family dynamics.

In his latest diabolical comedy-thriller, Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave, The Handmaiden) crafts a precision-tooled fable about the cutthroat nature of contemporary work culture, a brilliant bitter pill full of twists you will never see coming, that only Park could pull off with this level of delirious showmanship.

One of the all-time white-knuckle tension-fests in cinema history, Wages of Fear drops us into a very remote and mountainous region of Morocco, where four men in two trucks must transport a load of nitroglycerine over extremely bumpy terrain at the behest of a monolithic oil company to earn $2,000.

Werner Herzog’s none-too-subtle, but incredibly effective, broadside against the hubris of colonialism is one of the German master’s finest films. In 1560, a group of conquistadors head down the uncharted Amazon River in search of El Dorado. It turns out to be a really bad idea.

Julia Loktev's kinetic documentary, a brilliant vérité paranoid thriller, follows several Russian dissident journalists, mostly young women, during the fall and winter of 2021-2022, in the lead up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Julia Loktev's kinetic documentary, a brilliant vérité paranoid thriller, follows several Russian dissident journalists, mostly young women, during the fall and winter of 2021-2022, in the lead up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Based on a fantastically successful, Tony-winning 1975 Broadway hit, with a cast that includes Richard Pryor, Michael Jackson, Lena Horne, and Diana Ross, and behind-the-scenes talent including Berry Gordy, Quincy Jones, and Sidney Lumet, The Wiz is an eccentric, dazzling, befuddling, and often astonishing oddity.

The film that made a star of Jimmy Cliff and brought reggae to the world, Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come remains A-list cinema, a swaggering cops-robbers-and-reggae epic fueled by one of the great soundtracks in movie history.