Directed by Jem Cohen | 112 mins | 2015
The spirit of Chris Marker—a key artistic touchstone and a former correspondent of Cohen’s—is imbued in this travelog, with its slyly associative assemblage of globe-spanning images and its preponderance of cats. Sometimes veering lyrical, sometimes politic...

Directed by Roger Corman | 74 mins | 1961
Billed as a monster movie, Corman’s horror comedy actually begins as a spy caper, starring future Chinatown scribe Robert Towne as Agent XK150. Riffing on Castro’s then-recent revolution in Cuba, the bonkers story reels in a cutthroat mobster (Antony Carb...

Directed by Béla Tarr | 116 mins | 1987
Tarr’s first collaboration with writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai produces a quintessential Eastern bloc brew of voluptuous gloom and romantic doom that became the filmmaker’s defining style. The story of a hard-drinking man, the wicked cabaret singer he loves, a...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Alice Diop | 65 mins | 2011
Skillfully illustrating the persistence of racialized stereotyping and its impact on the individual, Diop’s documentary follows the professional struggles of a young Black actor from Aulnay-sous-bois, a disadvantaged community on the outs...

Directed by Harry Kümel | 87 mins | 1971
Profoundly inspired by the spirit of Belgian Surrealist and Symbolist painting, Kümel’s darkly poetic horror film begins with a young newlywed couple waylaid at a grand hotel en route to England, where they fall under the spell of the elegant Hungarian Cou...

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 127 mins | 2020
The parallel narratives of a middle-aged man seeking treatment for a chronic illness in Hong Kong (Lee Kang-sheng) and a Laotian immigrant in Bangkok (Anong Houngheuangsy) eventually, finally, meet in a moment of ecstatic release.

Directed by George Kuchar | 20 mins | 1994
Christmas is here again in this diary of glittering gifts, furry friends, underground movie making, and grotesque greetings. A veneer of good cheer coats the surface like thin ice, so proceed with caution!

Directed by Edo Bertoglio | 72 mins | 2000
In 1980, writer and Warhol associate Glenn O’Brien, Swiss photographer Edo Bertoglio, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, a graffiti innovator and noise music artist who’d just begun to exhibit his paintings, hit the streets of lower Manhattan to make a movie abou...

Directed by Mireille Dansereau | 85 mins | 1972
The first female-directed narrative fiction feature to come out of Quebec, Dansereau’s sensual and beguiling Dream Life centers on Isabelle and Virginie (Liliane Lemaître-Auger and Véronique Le Flaguais), two single young women who meet through thei...

Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn | 93 mins | 2024
Making films together since 2004, Kalman and Horn have developed and refined a style that’s entirely their own, an idiosyncratic blend of ethereal synth-scored reverie, deadpan absurdist humor, sly sociopolitical observation, and genre-ben...

Directed by Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós | 154 mins | 2022
In the Bolsonaro-era Brasilia of this incendiary two-hander—the second collaboration between directors Queirós and Pimenta—political resistance takes the form of an all-women gang who steal and refine oil before selling it on to bike...

Directed by Susan Sontag | 105 mins | 1969
In the late ’60s, a Swedish studio invited essayist, novelist, critic, cinephile, and all-around intellectual dynamo Susan Sontag to make her directorial debut in Stockholm. The resulting film, revolving around the quadrangular relationship between an ar...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Manoel de Oliveira | 63 mins | 2009
In Oliveira’s rueful romantic tale, an accountant grows obsessed with a formidable young woman he spots in a window across the street, and tries to court her despite his uncle’s snobby disapproval. Ricardo Trepa, who was both Oliv...

Directed by Joanna Hogg | 104 mins | 2013
Two married, childless fifty-something artists (Viv Albertine of the Slits and Liam Gillick) share an austere modernist townhouse and a crushing sense of ennui in Hogg’s third feature, a study in second-nature cohabitation that’s as precise in its rigorou...

Directed by Nathan Silver | 72 mins | 2012
One of the great under-the-radar debuts, Silver’s sly comedy drops a twenty-something nursing aide (Kia Davis) into a suburban house where her kibitzing employer—played by the director’s scene-stealing mom—keeps drawing her into drama and chit chat. Show...

Directed by Dick Richards | 95 mins | 1975
In this handsome adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1940 novel, noir icon Robert Mitchum meets one of the genre’s quintessential figures, Detective Philip Marlowe. The search for a missing girlfriend and a stolen jade necklace brings him into contact with ...

Directed by Jan Švankmajer | 92 mins | 1994
Drawing on a cluster of iterations of the Faust legend but faithful to none, Švankmajer reimagines the tale of a man’s compact with the Devil through flights of dark, deranging fancy. The inimitable Czech surrealist deploys his trademark combination of ...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 101 mins | 2010
An essay on Mediterranean culture and history in triptych form that locates a new, scintillating kind of beauty in the digital image, "Film Socialisme" moves from a cruise ship of venal bourgeois passengers to a portrait of political struggle at a Fre...

Directed by Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew | 12 mins | 2019
A teenager lives her life, toggling seamlessly between her physical and digital self. She walks over a bridge at sunrise, follows a stranger through the streets of the city, and meets up with a friend to wander their favorite spots in NY...

Directed by Éric Rohmer | 99 mins | 1987
Shot quickly in and around Paris during a production break on Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert, this breezy, witty film traces the exploits of two young women—one an ethnology student from the city, the other an unsophisticated aspiring artist from the country. Rein...

Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn | 6 mins | 2006
News of a gonorrhea infection only briefly sours the mood in this early Kalman and Horn short, which telegraphs a cheerful and occasionally violent beach party set in a winkingly lo-fi future.

Directed by Toshio Matsumoto | 105 mins | 1969
Part of the storied output of Japan’s radical Art Theatre Guild, Matsumoto’s dazzling voyage through Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood centers on two gender-nonconforming divas at “Bar Genet” but also doubles as a record of Japan’s avant-garde and subcul...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Karim Aïnouz | 107 mins | 2014
In this reflective romance from Brazilian auteur Aïnouz, a lifeguard (Wagner Moura) throws himself into a torrid affair with a motorcycling war veteran whose friend disappears in the ocean, but then struggles to find himself after trav...

Directed by Bruce D. Clark | 81 mins | 1981
The Corman tradition of riffing on genre trends rode strong into the 1980s with this cross between "Alien" and "Solaris" that anticipates "Nightmare on Elm Street". Rescuers sent to the planet Morganthus soon discover that their worst fears are taking p...