As a visionary and distinctive filmmaker, M. Night Shyamalan (b. 1970) has consistently garnered mixed reception of his work by critics and audiences alike. After the release of The Sixth Sense, one of ...

Christian Petzold (b. 1960) is the best-known filmmaker associated with the “Berlin School” of postunification German cinema. Identifying as an intellectual, Petzold self-consciously approaches his work for ...

The cinephile community knows Abbas Kiarostami (1940–2016) as one of the most important filmmakers of the previous decades. This volume illustrates why the Iranian filmmaker achieved critical acclaim a ...

Sofia Coppola (b. 1971) was baptized on film. After appearing in The Godfather as an infant, it took twenty-five years for Coppola to take her place behind the camera, helming her own adaptation of Jeffrey ...

The winner of two Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film in only five years, Asghar Farhadi (b. 1972) has become Iran’s most prominent director since the late Abbas Kiarostami. Around the world, especially i ...

A filmmaker whose work exhibits a wide range of styles and approaches, Louis Malle (1932–1995) was the only French director of his generation to enjoy a significant career in both France and the United S ...

Su Friedrich (b. 1954) has been described as an autobiographical filmmaker, an experimental filmmaker, a documentary filmmaker, an independent filmmaker, a feminist filmmaker, and a lesbian filmmaker—labels ...

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-Animator ...

Otto Preminger (1905–1986), whose Hollywood career spanned the 1930s through the 1970s, is popularly remembered for the acclaimed films he directed, among which are the classic film noir Laura, the social-realist ...

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, during t ...