7 Underrated Films By Great Directors

7. King Lear

The critical reception for this 1987 film has been mixed. Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times, described it as “tired, familiar and out of date,” but I’ve always seen it as Godard’s maximally pressurized condensation of his great themes: his manifesto of the image; a lost world of artistic culture, and, of course, of cinema. The casting alone proclaims the magnitude of his ambition: not only Meredith and Ringwald but Norman Mailer and his daughter Kate, Julie Delpy, Woody Allen, and, decisively, Peter Sellars as William Shakespeare, Jr., the Fifth, sent by the Queen of England to rediscover the works of his ancestor, which were lost along with all culture in the wake of Chernobyl.

This comic setup mocks the notion of filming King Lear as if it were a ready-made screenplay. There is no film of King Lear — indeed, no act of art — that is not a rediscovery, no image of nature that is not a resurrection. It’s an exhaustive, ungraspable experience, but one that is well worth witnessing.