Directed by Corneliu Porumboiu | 89 mins | 2006
On the 16th anniversary of the collapse of Nicolae Ceausescu’s oppressive regime just before Christmas, 1989, a TV station in the provincial town of Vaslui, Romania, plans to produce a program on those events, but can only find two “revolutionaries”...

Directed by Jafar Panahi | 100 mins | 2018
Panahi’s fourth post-filmmaking ban feature begins with a smartphone video of a young woman (Marziyeh Rezaei) who, forbidden by her parents to pursue her dream of acting professionally, appears to take her own life. The video is addressed to Behnaz Jafar...

Directed by Miguel Gomes | 27 mins | 2003
What does Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution have to do with "The Wizard of Oz" (1939)? This is a riddle set up but not exactly answered by this endearingly lo-fi parable about two rich kids who, after getting mugged during a tennis lesson, forge a wind...

Directed by Claire Denis | 100 mins | 2008
“It’s the best father-daughter movie I can think of. And it’s one of the greatest romances, too… The dance sequence to 'Night Shift' by the Commodores is not able to be described. We are witness to the most magical thing that can happen between two peopl...

Directed by Jack Hazan | 106 mins | 1973
Jack Hazan’s intimate and innovative film about English-born, often California-based artist David Hockney and his work honors its subject through creative risk-taking. The improvisatory narrative-nonfiction hybrid features Hockney—a wary participant—as wel...

Directed by Birdy Hung | 12 mins | 2024
Giallo meets Edward Yang in Birdy Wei-Ting Hung’s oneiric, gorgeously photographed short, which filters a schoolgirl’s sexual awakening in 1980s Taiwan through a series of potent, cinema-induced daydreams.

Directed by Kōji Fukada | 111 mins | 2019
As the carer for the elderly Toko, home nurse Ichiko is practically a member of the family, favored especially by the bedridden woman’s granddaughters. But Ichiko’s life—and identity—come unspooled after the abduction of Saki, the younger of the two girls...

Leaving December 15

Directed by Khady Sylla and Mariama Sylla | 63 mins | 2014
Begun by Sylla and completed by her sister, Mariama, after Khady’s death in 2013, "A Single Word" connects the essay film to the oral historical tradition of the griots—West African storytellers, musicians, and poets ...

Directed by Mary Stephen | 8 mins | 1975
Mary Stephen’s metaphor-rich, deeply compassionate contemplation of her mother’s death and its aftermath, which takes its title from the 1964 book by Simone de Beauvoir.

Directed by Yuri Illienko | 73 mins | 1965
Though Yuri Illienko completed his feature debut in the same year as Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors—on which he’d served as cinematographer—"A Well for the Thirsty", one of Ukrainian cinema’s most formally audacious films, was not rele...

Directed by Hlynur Pálmason | 109 mins | 2019
Hlynur Pálmason’s second film opens with the Icelandic proverb that gives "A White, White Day" its title: “On such days when everything is white, and there is no longer any difference between the earth and the sky, then the dead can talk to us who are...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Sebastian Pardo | 11 mins | 2015
An aspiring actress moves to Los Angeles to pursue her dream, and finds herself orbiting the periphery of show business, while everyday life muddies what exactly her path might be. Ana Coto, star of horror blockbuster "OUIJA", leads ...

Directed by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó | 93 mins | 2024
How do you measure joy? For Bhutan—a nation that conceptualized a “gross national happiness" in 1972 and has collected data on its citizens’ satisfaction for almost two decades—the answer might just be mathematical. But the truth is h...

Directed by Werner Herzog | 94 mins | 1972
The first collaboration between Herzog and Klaus Kinski cast the notoriously unhinged actor as the even more unhinged 16th-century conquistador Don Lope de Aguirre—nicknamed “El Loco” or “The Madman”—found embarking on his final mission: a frantic search...

Directed by Kore-eda Hirokazu | 116 mins | 2009
A Tokyo waiter’s sex doll (Korean star Bae Doona) comes to life in this bittersweet modern fairy tale from the director of "Shoplifters" and "Nobody Knows." Her wide-eyed wanderings bring out the loneliness of the metropolis—shot by Hou Hsiao-hsien’...

Directed by Shunji Iwai | 146 mins | 2001
Incredibly prescient in its understanding of how a still-young internet would fundamentally alter youth culture, Shunji’s film introduces Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) in an ice field, the landscape gradually obscured by accreting chat room messages. Alienated...

Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve | 98 mins | 2007
Mia Hansen-Løve was only twenty-five when she directed one of the most striking and auspicious first features in 21st century French cinema, which finds the brisk economy of expression, nuanced characterization, and formal daring of her future films (F...

Leaving December 15

Directed by Khady Sylla | 52 mins | 2005
After an unsatisfactory attempt to make a film about the numerous mentally ill people who filled the streets of Dakar back in 1994, Sylla, in her own words “fell ill and crossed to the other side, seeing what others don’t see.” Now “li...

Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi | 119 mins | 2018
Between the international breakthrough of 2015’s "Happy Hour" and the sensation that was 2021’s "Drive My Car," Hamaguchi produced this beguiling romance, concerning a young woman and her affairs with, first, a self-dramatizing young drifter, Baku, ...

Leaving January 1

Directed by John Carpenter | 91 mins | 1976
As lean and brooding as its skeletal synth theme music, possessed from the first frame with an inimitable sense of ambient menace, Carpenter’s second feature is a marvel of action filmmaking economy. Its siege-on-an-LA-police-station ...

Directed by Ivan Mykolaichuk |100 mins | 1979
Having acted in several seminal Ukrainian films of the 1960s and ’70s, Ivan Mykolaichuk made his directorial debut with this work of fervid romanticism and rough-hewn beauty, set in the village of Babylon in the years after the revolution but before c...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Alex Budovsky | 3 mins | 2003
This animation is based on Stephen Coates' composition under the same title and is about The Great Revolution of the British Cuckoos, who bravely took over London, forcing all the people to move inside the cuckoo clocks. This film was t...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Patrick Smith | 4 mins | 2020
"Beyond Noh" rhythmically animates 3,475 individual masks from all over the world, beginning with the distinctive masks of the Japanese Noh theater and continuing on a cultural journey through ritual, utility, deviance, and politics.

Directed by Xuan Liang and Chun Zhang | 105 mins | 2016
“Spirited Away” meets “The Little Mermaid” in this gorgeously crafted fantasy blockbuster—a tale of shapeshifting, interspecies love and sacrifice sprung from ancient Chinese fables. The teenaged Chun—one of a mythical race of beings residin...