Curated playlist
Directors of Palme d'Or winners
- Martin ScorseseMartin Scorsese had asthma as a boy and could not play sports or join in games with the other children. So his parents and his older brother took him to the movies instead. That is where his passion for cinema began, in a child who could…
- Orson WellesOrson Welles was born on the 6th of May 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and died on the 10th of October 1985. In between those dates, he directed what is consistently ranked as one of the greatest films ever made, terrified radio listeners…
- Quentin TarantinoQuentin Tarantino was born on the 27th of March 1963, in Knoxville, Tennessee, to a mother who let him watch R-rated films as a child and a father he never met. By his late twenties, he would be handing a barely formatted screenplay to a…
- David LynchDavid Lynch was born on the 20th of January 1946 at St. Patrick's Hospital in Missoula, Montana, the son of a USDA research scientist and an English-language tutor. He died on the 16th of January 2025, four days before what would have been…
- Roman PolanskiRoman Polanski was born on the 18th of August 1933 in interbellum Paris, the child of two agnostics from very different worlds. His mother was raised Catholic despite having a Jewish father. His father was a Jewish painter and sculptor…
- William WylerWilliam Wyler walked away from the set of Ben-Hur in 1959 having just overseen a chariot race that took six months to film. The budget had ballooned from $7 million to $15 million, and everyone on the lot knew that if the picture failed,…
- Terrence MalickTerrence Malick graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude in 1965, won a Rhodes Scholarship to study philosophy at Oxford, then walked away from the whole enterprise without a degree after a dispute with his advisor. He translated a…
- Francis Ford CoppolaFrancis Ford Coppola illegally hired a grave robber to supply real human corpses as props, and oversaw the ritualistic killing of a water buffalo. This was the production of Apocalypse Now, a film so plagued by delays it earned the mocking…
- Akira KurosawaAkira Kurosawa directed 30 feature films across six decades, and yet the moment that first made the world notice him came about almost by accident. In 1951, the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival went to a Japanese film that even its…
- Michelangelo AntonioniMichelangelo Antonioni died in Rome on the 30th of July 2007, the same day as Ingmar Bergman. Two titans of world cinema left on the same afternoon. Antonioni was 94 years old. His body lay in state at City Hall in Rome, where a large…
- David LeanDavid Lean spent fourteen years in silence after one of the most brutal critical encounters in cinema history. At a lunch in the Algonquin Hotel in New York, a gathering of the National Society of Film Critics spent two hours tearing apart…
- Robert BressonJean-Luc Godard once wrote of one man, "He is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." The man Godard meant was Robert Bresson, a French filmmaker born on the 25th of September 1901 and dead on the…
- Richard LesterRichard Lester Liebman arrived at the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 15, already a graduate of a Quaker school in Philadelphia, studying clinical psychology rather than film. No one watching that prodigy walk across campus in the…