Art film

[5] These qualities can include (among other elements) a sense of social realism; an emphasis on the authorial expressiveness of the director; and a focus on the thoughts, dreams, or motivations of characters, as opposed to the unfolding of a clear, goal-driven story.

Although never a formally organized movement, New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of classical cinematic form and their spirit of youthful iconoclasm, and their films are an example of European art cinema.

Some of the most prominent pioneers among the group, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette, began as critics for the film magazine Cahiers du cinéma.

that "[a]side from Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather series, with its deft flashbacks and gritty social realism, ...[there is not]... a single film produced over the past 35 years that is arguably of equal philosophical weight or virtuosity of execution to Bergman's The Seventh Seal or Persona".

Paglia states that young people from the 2000s do not "have patience for the long, slow take that deep-think European directors once specialized in", an approach which gave "luxurious scrutiny of the tiniest facial expressions or the chilly sweep of a sterile room or bleak landscape".

To bridge the disconnect between popular taste and high culture, these film critics are expected to explain unfamiliar concepts and make them appealing to cultivate a more discerning movie-going public.

The U.S. film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) by German Expressionist director F. W. Murnau uses distorted art design and groundbreaking cinematography to create an exaggerated, fairy-tale-like world rich with symbolism and imagery.

In 1945, David Lean directed Brief Encounter, an adaptation of Noël Coward's play Still Life, which observes a passionate love affair between an upper-class man and a middle-class woman amidst the social and economic issues that Britain faced at the time.

In Poland, the Khrushchev Thaw permitted some relaxation of the regime's cultural policies, and productions such as A Generation, Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds, Lotna (1954–1959), all directed by Andrzej Wajda, showed the Polish Film School style.

A year later, Mizoguchi directed Sansho the Bailiff (1954), which tells the story of two aristocratic children sold into slavery; in addition to dealing with serious themes such as the loss of freedom, the film features beautiful images and long, complicated shots.

The intellectual and visually expressive films of Tadeusz Konwicki, such as All Souls' Day (Zaduszki, 1961) and Salto (1962), inspired discussions about war and raised existential questions on behalf of their everyman protagonists.

[37] In 1967, in Soviet Georgia, influential Georgian film director Tengiz Abuladze directed Vedreba (Entreaty), which was based on the motifs of Vaja-Pshavela's literary works, where story is told in a poetic narrative style, full of symbolic scenes with philosophical meanings.

Terrence Malick, who directed Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978), shared many traits with Tarkovsky, such as his long, lingering shots of natural beauty, evocative imagery, and poetic narrative style.

Other directors in the 1980s chose a more intellectual path, exploring philosophical and ethical issues like Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron (1981), a critique of the Polish communist government, which won the 1981 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

In 1989, Woody Allen made, in the words of New York Times critic Vincent Canby, his most "securely serious and funny film to date", Crimes and Misdemeanors, which involves multiple stories of people who are trying to find moral and spiritual simplicity while facing dire issues and thoughts surrounding the choices they make.

David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), a film noir-style thriller-mystery filled with symbolism and metaphors about polarized worlds and inhabited by distorted characters who are hidden in the seamy underworld of a small town, became surprisingly successful considering its highly disturbing subject matter.

The characters' masks erase all human personality and give the impression of total control over the "matter" of the image and its optical composition, using distorted areas, obscure visions, metamorphoses, and synthetic objects.

In the 1990s, directors took inspiration from the success of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) and created films with bizarre alternative worlds and elements of surrealism.

The Coen Brothers' Barton Fink (1991), which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, features various literary allusions in an enigmatic story about a writer who encounters a range of bizarre characters, including an alcoholic, abusive novelist and a serial killer.

In 1992, Rebels of the Neon God, first feature film of Tsai Ming-liang, second generation of Taiwanese New Wave, it has his unique style of filmmaking like alienation, slow movement of actor (his recurring cast, Lee Kang-sheng), slow-paced, and a few dialogues.

Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Double Life of Véronique (1991) is a drama about the theme of identity and a political allegory about the East/West split in Europe; the film features stylised cinematography, an ethereal atmosphere, and unexplained supernatural elements.

The reviewer stated that "[a]ll the ingredients that have come to define Lars von Trier's career (and in turn, much of modern European cinema) are present here: high-wire acting, innovative visual techniques, a suffering heroine, issue-grappling drama, and a galvanising shot of controversy to make the whole thing unmissable".

[71] Unlike the action-oriented Jesse James films of the past, Dominik's unconventional epic perhaps more accurately details the outlaw's relinquishing psyche during the final months of his life as he succumbs to the paranoia of being captured and develops a precarious friendship with his eventual assassin, Robert Ford.

"[72] Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which won the 2010 Cannes Palme d'Or, "ties together what might just be a series of beautifully shot scenes with moving and funny musings on the nature of death and reincarnation, love, loss, and karma".

(2017), Annihilation (2018), A Quiet Place (2018), Hereditary (2018), Suspiria (2018; a remake of the 1977 film of the same name), Mandy (2018), The Nightingale (2018), The House That Jack Built (2018), Us (2019), Midsommar (2019), The Lighthouse (2019), Color Out of Space (2019) and the Academy Award for Best Picture winner Parasite (2019).

[89][90][91] Tom Shone said of the work of Christopher Nolan: "He has completed eleven features, [...] all ticking the boxes of studio entertainment, yet indelibly marked with the kind of personal themes and obsessions that are more traditionally the preserve of the art house: the passage of time, the failures of memory, our quirks of denial and deflection, the intimate clockwork of our interior lives, set against landscapes in which the fault lines of late industrialism meet the fissure points and paradoxes of the information age.

Television shows, such as David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks and Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, also have "a loosening of causality, a greater emphasis on psychological or anecdotal realism, violations of classical clarity of space and time, explicit authorial comment, and ambiguity".

[98] As with much of Lynch's other work (notably the film Blue Velvet), Twin Peaks explores the gulf between the veneer of small-town respectability and the seedier layers of life lurking beneath its surface.

The show is difficult to place in a defined television genre; stylistically, it borrows the unsettling tone and supernatural premises of horror films and simultaneously offers a bizarrely comical parody of American soap operas with a campy, melodramatic presentation of the morally dubious activities of its quirky characters.

The show represents an earnest moral inquiry distinguished by both weird humor and a deep vein of surrealism, incorporating highly stylised vignettes, surrealist and often inaccessible artistic images alongside the otherwise comprehensible narrative of events.