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Francis Ford Coppola’s 1982 film One from the Heart, a romantic fantasy set in Las Vegas, was intended as a light, frothy venture to follow the grueling, tortured production of Apocalypse Now. Instead, the movie …

The immigrant’s sense of dislocation resonates in the films of Mira Nair, who often focuses on different permutations of the outsider—Bombay street urchins in Salaam Bombay!, Cuban immigrants in The Perez Family, a sixteenth-century Indian …

Brad Bird made his mark as an animation director with the 1999 film The Iron Giant, which has gained recognition over time as a classic of storytelling and visual style. Bird’s next film, The Incredibles, …

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada was movie star Tommy Lee Jones’s debut as a theatrical film director. Set in his native Texas, this provocative blend of road movie and western, partly inspired by Sam …

Legendary maverick Melvin Van Peebles is a novelist, composer, and filmmaker who has also worked in television, popular music, and theater. After spending the 1960s in Paris, he returned to the United States and made …

Conrad Hall belongs with figures like Gregg Toland, Jack Cardiff, and Sven Nykvist in the pantheon of great cinematographers—artists who use light and shadow to craft indelible images and tell unforgettable stories. Hall grew up …

Tim Burton may be Hollywood’s most childlike grown-up—or its most grown-up child. Either way, Burton’s fanciful movies express both the bright and dark sides of his boundless imagination. His heroes, including Pee-wee Herman, Edward Scissorhands, …

The versatile, often outspoken actor Tim Robbins made his debut as a director and writer with the prescient and impressive political satire Bob Roberts, a mock documentary in which he plays a right-wing, folk-singing Senate …

As a teenager growing up in the Bronx, George A. Romero was arrested for hurling a flaming dummy off a roof while filming his 8mm epic The Man from the Meteor. Always a resourceful provocateur, …

Boys Don’t Cry marked the arrival of three major talents: its two stars, Hillary Swank (who won the Oscar for Best Actress) and Chloë Sevigny, and its ferociously gifted director, Kimberly Peirce. Dramatizing the true …