“There is not, not, not, not, not a Romanian New Wave,” Cristi Puiu—whose film "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" is the earliest in this collection—averred, with some exasperation, in a 2008 New York Times interview. But how else to limn the filmmakers who emerged like a rash onto the international fe...

Frank Ripploh’s attraction to the abject and the outré made him a sui generis deviant in a career which saw him befriend and collaborate with many of New German Cinema’s cynosures, among them Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Magdalena Montezuma, and Ulrike Ottinger. His most notable work remains "Taxi z...

Amnesiacs, apocalyptic romances, and arcane scriptures: all the reveries of cinema’s past and future collide at breakneck speed in the films of Guy Maddin, the silver screen’s most singular surrealist and slipperiest stylist. The Canadian cult director’s oeuvre feels beamed in from an alternate d...

Born in a fishing town in southeastern Iceland, Hlynur Pálmason trained as a visual artist before embarking on a film career. Accordingly, his work often bears a painterly quality, using the gelid tundras of his homeland as a backdrop to stage existential quarrels—between beauty and brutality, be...