One Scene

The long, quietly tense opening minutes of L’eclisse offer a blueprint for filmmakers looking to craft a devastating breakup scene.

The director of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair reflects on the transformative power of a Sonic Youth needle drop in Olivier Assayas’s 1996 film.

The production designer of Pariah explains how Federico Fellini imbues the mysterious, bare-bones structure in the film’s final scene with profound metaphorical significance.

The author of Velvet Was the Night pays tribute to the shockingly stripped-down, dread-inducing use of silence in Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterful neonoir.

The director of Test Pattern examines how toxic masculinity gets in the way of the domestic bliss briefly enjoyed by the film’s downtrodden protagonists.

The Oscar-nominated director of Another Round tells us why Ingmar Bergman has always been a cinematic role model for him and what he learned from the Swedish auteur’s approach to capturing human behavior.

The director of Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest examines the violence and unexpected humanism in one of Michael Haneke’s most unnerving long takes.

A rich investment banker obliviously meets a moment of reckoning in David Fincher’s intricately plotted thriller.

Filmmakers Ashley Connor, Anna Rose Holmer, Kirsten Johnson, and Lauren Wolkstein explore the moments in the French master’s oeuvre that resonate most deeply with them.

Separated from the domestic spaces they once inhabited, two glass vases and a mahogany desk settle into a caged museum life in Olivier Assayas’s deeply felt family portrait.

The director of Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project and Spaceship Earth reflects on the power of seeing a moment of pure joy—the defeat of California’s homophobic Proposition 6 in 1978—in Rob Epstein’s classic portrait of Harvey Milk.

The director of Beasts of the Southern Wild and Wendy finds inspiration in the 1973 documentary Dry Wood, one of his first cinematic encounters with his adopted home of Louisiana.

Artificiality becomes a pathway to unbearable reality in a shocking scene at the center of Lars von Trier’s nightmarish marital drama.

In celebration of Federico Fellini’s 100th birthday, the director of The Farewell talks about the deeply moving final scene of Nights of Cabiria and its mixture of pain and hope.

A boy-meets-girl seduction accelerates at absurd speed in Catherine Breillat’s controversial coming-of-age film, transporting us to a realm beyond naturalism.

The director of Synonyms reflects on the subtle physicality of Jean-Pierre Léaud and Chantal Goya during one long, meandering conversation in the French New Wave classic.

The director of Audition and First Love dives into the haunting moral ambiguity of Akira Kurosawa’s crime masterpiece.

In one of the most overpowering moments in any concert documentary, D. A. Pennebaker immortalized soul icon Otis Redding as both palpable presence and luminescent mystery.

The trashy contrivances of Magnificent Obsession give way to brilliant, high-art mise-en-scène in a memorable scene that plays with the theme of lost vision.

The director of Midsommar finds the joy of collaboration and creation in Mike Leigh’s period epic.

The director of the Sundance hit The Last Black Man in San Francisco reflects on what he learned from Ken Russell’s extravagant style and approach to the subject of male relationships.

One of the quietest, most unassuming moments in Michael Haneke’s disturbing drama serves as a microcosm of his themes of control and sexuality.

Early in his boundary-pushing Sweet Movie, Serbian renegade Dušan Makavejev stages a pageant of visual grotesquerie that speaks to the luridness of our contemporary age.

The great Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke recalls what his first encounters with Vittorio De Sica’s masterpiece taught him about the possibilities of cinematic realism.