Directed by India Donaldson | 14 mins | 2019
Amy Zimmer and Brenna Palughi give finely calibrated, increasingly squirm-inducing performances in Donaldson’s beguiling, darkly funny two-hander about a woman named Hannah who returns to her apartment one day to discover another woman, also named Hann...

Directed by Rungano Nyoni | 93 mins | 2017
A young Zambian girl is accused of being a witch and then pressed into soothsaying service by a slick government official in this strikingly shot deadpan satire. Skewering superstition and corruption, it’s a feminist exposé of exploitation done with dazz...

Directed by India Donaldson | 8 mins | 2021
Set in an off-season beach town emptied out for the winter, Donaldson’s by turns unsettling and comic short is a deft character study done in small, precise strokes, following a troubled, lonesome, dog-obsessed woman who decides to take extralegal measu...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 83 mins | 2023
The second of two films put out by the prolific Hong in 2023, following "In Water", "In Our Day" is a lightfooted diptych that drifts into existential territory. The tale of a recently single actress, played by Hong’s longtime “muse” Kim Min-hee, who’s st...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 61 mins | 2023
Do not adjust your set: the beguiling 29th film by Hong Sangsoo—who has distilled his art to the point of operating as virtually a one-man studio—was deliberately shot out of focus. This softly radical conceit mirrors the uncertainty of one of the central...

Directed by Gayle Thomas | 5 mins | 1974
A rainbow of delicately cut-out snowflakes flash, dance, and subdivide to shimmering steel drum in this delightfully geometrical interlude by Ottawa animator Gayle Thomas.

Directed by Miguel Gomes | 19 mins | 2002
A short as puckish as the kids it depicts, in which a soccer game is rendered absurd by the fact that these self-proclaimed ten-year-olds are played by adults. In place of speech, they just mash their mouths together, with the translation supplied by sile...

Directed by Claire Denis | 130 mins | 2004
One of Claire Denis’s most ambitious, complicated, and exhilaratingly daring films charts an itinerary traveling from the snowy Alps to Korea to Tahiti, following an old mercenary (Michel Subor, from "Le Petit Soldat" and "Beau Travail") in search of bot...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 96 mins | 1967
Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, and Anne Wiazemsky co-star in Godard’s rouge-tinted, slogan-splattered political comedy concerning five innocents passing their summer vacation in a shared apartment by discoursing on Mao, performing agitprop theater, a...

Directed by Mary Stephen | 5 mins | 1973
Two identically dressed women, one white, one Asian, negotiate winding, maze-like corridors. This experimental, oneiric work dating from Stephen’s time in Canada plays as a cinematic meditation on cross-cultural identity, an exploration of the psychologica...

Directed by Park Chan Wook | 115 mins | 2005
The capper of Park’s “Revenge Trilogy” follows a woman wrongfully imprisoned for kidnapping and killing a six-year-old boy, as she meticulously lays the groundwork for an elaborate plan of retribution, then sets it into merciless motion on her release....

Directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson | 72 mins | 2020
Two billion years in the future, humanity finds itself on the verge of extinction. Almost all that remains are lone, surreal monuments—the futuristic, solemn, Brutalist stone slabs erected during the communist era in the former Yugoslav republics, ar...

Directed by Henry Jaglom | 108 mins | 1995
Percolating existential crises, too-candid conversation, and, naturally, theatrics are in ample store when a family of stage actors and directors and playwrights assemble to bid farewell to their old summer house in this Cherry Orchard-tinted dramedy. As...

Directed by Cate Shortland | 109 mins | 2012
Cate Shortland followed her moody and startling feature debut, "Somersault" (2004), with another bruising story of a teen girl expelled from home—in this case, by history in the making. Abandoned by her high-level Nazi parents in the wake of Hitler’s d...

Directed by Nicolás Pereda | 76 mins | 2024
Three actors compete for a role in the same low-budget movie and for each other’s amorous attentions in this low-key but formally playful existentialist comedy by Nicolás Pereda. Deftly blending fact, fiction, and fable, the Mexican-Canadian director re...

Directed by Fruit Chan | 109 mins | 1997
The first independent film released in post-Handover Hong Kong, Chan’s atmospheric shoestring-budget character study is a rough-and-ready piece of work shot on grainy leftover 35mm short ends in the city’s overcrowded subsidized housing projects. The resul...

Directed by Nina Menkes | 90 mins | 1986
Menkes took home the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s “Best Independent Film” prize with her hypnotic but disturbing debut feature, in which her sister Tinka plays Ida, a sex worker accused of killing her pimp. Moving between a string of seedy, East ...

Directed by Ugo Bienvenu and Kévin Manach | 5 mins | 2013
An unsettling portrait of domestic anomie, in which communication between family members has broken down. What remains is the persistent whistling of a pot, an iron thumped against the wall, and the matriarch’s wordless, raspy scream. 

Directed by David Osit | 89 mins | 2020
Winner of a 2022 Peabody Award, this gripping and surprisingly droll portrait of Musa Hadid during his second term as the mayor of Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital, is equally a portal into the Israel-Palestine conflict just prior to the genocidal...

Directed by Miguel Gomes | 23 mins | 1999
Two decades before "The Tsugua Diaries" (2021), Gomes would make his assured debut with another film that fused summer languor and simmering tensions with expertly deployed pop music cues. The teen love triangle of Meanwhile drifts from rugby training to ...

Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien | 107 mins | 2001
A seductive submersion into the techno-scored neon nightlife of Taipei, Hou’s much-misunderstood marvel follows an aimless bar hostess drifting away from her blowhard boyfriend and towards a suave, sensitive gangster. A transfixing trance-out of a mov...

Directed by Oliver Laxe | 96 mins | 2016
Laxe’s gorgeously composed film, winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes, follows a caravan transporting a dying sheikh to the village of his birth in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains—a journey his corpse will complete in the company of two strangers. A...

Directed by Paul Morrissey | 99 mins | 1984
Brazilian diva Marília Pêra, fresh from her international breakthrough in Héctor Babenco’s "Pixote," is the queenly matriarch of a dope-dealing dynasty in Morrissey’s marvelous, grimly funny Alphabet City melodrama, concerning a turf war between rival d...

Directed by Géza von Radványi | 91 mins | 1958
Leaving aside the portrayals of royals that had been her breakthrough, Romy Schneider ventured into more risqué territory with this story of Sapphic desire bubbling up in a Potsdam boarding school—the second silver screen adaptation of Christa Winslo...