James Gray
Born in New York City and raised in Flushing, Queens, James Gray is one of the last great torchbearers for the New Hollywood tradition, crafting emphatically American stories with the kind of literary sophistication and distinctive autobiographical voice more often seen in classic European auteur cinema. His films are rich in emotional heft, forensic detail and historical context. Indeed, by mining his own Russian-Jewish heritage in fine-grained dramas like The Immigrant (2013) and Armageddon Time (2022), Gray reminds us how the European émigré experience deeply informs America’s origin story. For Galerie, he has curated a culturally broad list of favorites spanning American, French, Italian, Russian and Japanese films, diverse in style and tone but united by a fundamentally compassionate sensibility. The unique beauty of cinema, Gray observes, is that “[we] can dive into somebody else’s soul for an hour and a half... That’s everything in art.”
A personal message
my Film List
Click each title to discover our curator’s notes and where to watch
William A. Wellman making some pre-Code cinema. Stripped down and powerful and alive. A humane picture, humorous and filled with life.
{{ All Items }}A stunning drama, thrilling and direct. Vivid and unsentimental and memorable, with one of cinema’s greatest endings.
{{ All Items }}Sober and emotional, with wonderful ethical dilemmas for the characters. A metaphorical father-and-son story, replete with complex situations.
{{ All Items }}Spencer Tracy at his best, and that’s saying something. Father comes to understand daughter and embrace her dreams.
{{ All Items }}Frightening and evocative and troubling. Also at times quite funny. Essential early French New Wave.
{{ All Items }}Love and longing are at the center of this brooding, magnificent movie, which also has a great performance by Kim Novak.
{{ All Items }}A disturbing and vital film about an officer rivalry at an army base in Scotland. This is the brilliant Alec Guinness at his peak.
{{ All Items }}The brilliant use of music highlights a moving and tender love story. Claudia Cardinale delivers a towering performance.
{{ All Items }}This film’s formal astonishments may be front and center, but its vision of national heartbreak is epic. Designed as propaganda, the movie transcends politics.
{{ All Items }}Tony Curtis is incredible, and there is remarkable split-screen and multiple-screen stuff here. The depiction of his interrogation and breakdown is memorable.
{{ All Items }}Tremendously atmospheric movie set in mod London, with a teenage boy’s crush on a bathhouse co-worker as the focus. Great use of color and music (by Can and Cat Stevens).
{{ All Items }}Four hours, and I love every minute. Luxurious, insane, indulgent, decadent, strange. Romy Schneider laughing at the lavish mirrors in Herrenchiemsee is sublime.
{{ All Items }}Perhaps the most macabre buddy comedy ever made. Cruel, honest and strange. Also provocative and expressive—the ultimate antihero movie.
I came late to The Desert of the Tartars, Valerio Zurlini’s final film. Perhaps this is as it should be, for Tartars is, above all, a stark and anguished and mournful picture, the kind that benefits greatly from a heightened awareness of one’s own mortality. And though the film stands out as a true physical marvel (shot on location in an ancient castle in Iran) it is not the movie’s epic visual splendor which impacts us most. The soldiers within the fort may start out seeking grandeur, but in the end, these lonely souls roam the great castle like ghosts, adrift, unable to conquer time’s punishing indifference. The cast is the stuff of legend: Trintignant, Noiret, Von Sydow, Rey, Gassman, Rabal, Perrin; and the score is by the legendary Ennio Morricone.
The Taviani brothers confront the catastrophe of World War II in Italy. The power of fantasy and imagination in the face of terror.
Yoshimitsu Morita’s 1983 film plumbs the stresses and strains of modern Japanese life. Funny, disturbing and wonderfully observed, with remarkable tone shifts handled effortlessly.
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Selections from the list
“They’re just films that I think are beautiful works of art that matter to me.”
MY CREATIVE PROCESS
Exploring craft and influence
Galerie Originals
James Gray The Scene: Armageddon Time WATCH
RELATED MATERIAL
Essays, interviews and other connections
![I, Claudia]()
I, ClaudiareadA radiant inhabitant of thorny roles as well as her legendary beauty, Claudia Cardinale looks back on her work with Fellini, Visconti, Zurlini and other 20th-century greats
By Christopher Bollen
![Home Invasion]()
Home InvasionreadTaking one Tokyo household as its subject, The Family Game brilliantly depicts the human cost of Japan’s industrial boom
By Hideaki Fujiki with Robert Bound
![Soldier of Fortune]()
Soldier of FortunereadHow Paul Muni’s devastating pre-Code portrayal of a marginalized veteran inspired real-life political reform
By Steve Mears
