Leaving January 1

Directed by Manoel de Oliveira | 95 mins | 2012
Oliveira’s triumphant swansong turns a family dinner into a percolating drama of mortality and morality as a bookkeeper and his wife reckon with their estranged son’s thievery. The cast is a roster of arthouse legends: Michael Lon...

Directed by Aaron Schimberg | 88 mins | 2013
Schimberg’s uncanny debut feature is a handcrafted American Gothic pastiche that’s like sitting in on hidden scenes from the 19th century. Lost soldiers, ghosts and lovers, schoolhouse lessons and cabaret songs—these dispatches from the past possess th...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 70 mins | 2014
An innovator to the end, Godard’s penultimate feature finds him experimenting with the possibilities of digital 3D, using the technology to plot the disintegration of both a couple’s relationship and the images of the relationship. A film of unpreceden...

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 82 mins | 2003
Like the Royal Theater in The Last Picture Show and the title movie house in Cinema Paradiso, the Fu-Ho is shutting down for good. A palace with seemingly mile-wide rows of red velvet seats, the likes of which you’ve seen only in your most nostalgic dr...

Directed by Johanna Makabi | 14 mins | 2022
An 8-year-old girl—and frustrated cheerleader—believes that the sky is no limit as she seeks to join her father in space in Makabi’s wondrous portrait in imaginative self-determination.

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 115 mins | 2010
Two friends in a bar trade stories about their romantic exploits at a beach, which we come to realize involve the same people (including a restaurant owner played by Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung). Through adroit layering, Hong brings a wry sympathy to the ...

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 George Kuchar | 16 mins | 1994
The season sweeps through in a blur of glitches, gulps and sweetened goo, as chimes wring out the old and ring in the new.

Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 110 mins | 1992
One of the treasures of contemporary cinema, Senegalese master Mambéty made his long-delayed follow-up to his canonical Touki Bouki with this hallucinatory comic adaptation of Swiss avant-garde writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit. In Mam...

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...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Angela Schanelec | 95 mins | 2019
One of European art cinema’s most distinctive voices, Schanelec—Silver Bear winner for Best Director at this year's Berlinale—orchestrates a tense elliptical drama that’s part psychological close-up, part middle-class Berlin pastich...

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 | 89 mins | 2012
Isabelle Huppert plays three variations on the role of a Frenchwoman abroad in Korea in her first venture into Hong’s peculiar, soju-soaked world, and is the connecting link between the elements of this triptych of glancing, awkward romantic encounters wh...

Directed by Dario Argento | 106 mins | 1980
Showing Argento’s doubling down on visual logic of dreams, this mystical yarn of alchemy and witchcraft unfolds as a series of lurid setpieces and cryptic clue-drops, largely in a New York apartment building. Resisting explication, the story erupts with...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 66 mins | 2021
This devilishly deft portrait of missed and near-missed connections orbits a young man (Shin Seok-ho) adrift, sketching out his romantic and familial relationships in three parts (and a mere 66 minutes). Shooting his own feature for the first time, in bla...

Directed by Eliza Hittman | 82 mins | 2013
There’s not a single false moment in It Felt Like Love, Never Rarely Sometimes Always director Hittman’s feature debut about a sexually inexperienced south Brooklyn teenager (Gina Piersanti) who’s embarrassed to fess up to everything she doesn’t know abo...

Directed by Lisandro Alonso | 110 mins | 2014
Viggo Mortensen stars as a Danish engineer who joins the Argentine army at the very ends of the Earth in the 1800s. When his daughter elopes with a soldier, Mortensen’s mercenary heads into the harsh wilderness on a search, which director Alonso rende...

Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn | 9 mins | 2007
The decadent gathering of this early Kalman and Horn short does not take place on Christmas but rather New Year's Eve, 1927, nor does it feature any jazz proper—but it does have characters performing a riff on The Strokes’ “New York City Cop...

Directed by Marcell Jankovics | 78 mins | 1973
An exiled shepherd roams the earth, longing for his lover and seeking his fortune, in this Yellow Submarine-esque cavalcade of color and adventure. Produced as a 150th-anniversary tribute to Hungary’s national poet Sandor Petofi, the lyrical story is...

Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn | 73 mins | 2014
Only ’90s kids will remember: in this affectionate but ironic throwback, structured as a series of piquant, deadpan vignettes, grad students on vacation lounge and mull over matters both petty and metaphysical. Captured on sparkling 16mm, t...

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 both a ...

Directed by Kip Fulbeck | 13 mins | 1996
In this short, a conversation between the California-born artist and his Cantonese-American mother overlays fuzzy, black-and-white footage—shot on PixelVision—of the family Christmas celebration. Here as in his photography, spoken word, and writing, Fulbec...

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 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....