Leaving August 1

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 ...

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 resu...

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 Sky Hopinka | 80 mins | 2020
The Chinookan people’s origin-of-death myth is at the core of Indigenous filmmaker Hopinka’s dreamy, ethereal debut feature, an experimental documentary following young parents Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier as they struggle with concerns surrounding...

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 mo...

Directed by Emily Atef | 123 mins | 2022
Starring a luminous Vicky Krieps and Gaspard Ulliel in one of his final screen appearances, the heartrending "More Than Ever" relates a life, and a marriage, rerouted by the diagnosis of a rare lung disease. Though Hélène loves her husband Mathieu dearly, ...

Directed by Patrick Tam | 90 mins | 1989
One of the unheralded masterworks of the Hong Kong New Wave, Tam’s high-style “heroic bloodshed” melodrama stars Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Kenny Bee, and Joey Wong as friends bound by ties both criminal and romantic. With shamelessly pulpy plotting, luxuriously...

Directed by Raúl Ruiz | 267 mins | 2010
It is a rare thing for one of a filmmaker’s final works to rank among their greatest, and their most classically sumptuous—but such is the case with Ruiz’s sweeping, four-and-a-half-hour-long adaptation of Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco’s novel of...

Directed by Kim Torres | 14 mins | 2022
In this impressionistic, Cannes-selected short, set in rural Costa Rica and tinged with melancholy, 17-year-old Ale strives to sustain the playful innocence of her two younger siblings after they’re abandoned by their mother.

Directed by Alexandra Simpson | 93 mins | 2024
The threat of an impending hurricane has sent most of the residents of and visiting tourists to the coastal Florida town of Atlantic Beach scurrying for cover—but Simpson’s ravishing mood piece lingers behind with a handful of holdouts ignoring the ...

Directed by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan | 83 mins | 2024
Filmed in the lush, remote forests of the Eastern Himalayas at the India-Bhutan border, Dutta and Srinivasan’s exquisitely crafted documentary immerses the viewer in the hidden nocturnal life of a little-seen corner of the globe, ...

Directed by Lee Chang-dong | 133 mins | 2002
Jong-du (Sul Kyung-gu), just out of prison, very little reformed, and shunned by his family, finds an unlikely soulmate in the person of Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), a woman with severe cerebral palsy—and the daughter of the victim of the hit-and-run for whic...

Directed by Wei Shujun | 102 mins | 2023
After a woman’s body is discovered on a river bank in rural southern China, police investigator Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) finds that it’s only the first layer of a deepening mystery, bound up in the hidden life of the nearby community. Based on Yu Hua’s short n...

Directed by Albert Serra | 165 mins | 2022
Serra’s mesmerizing portrait of a French bureaucrat’s (Benoît Magimel) visit to a French Polynesian island charts the uneasy relationships between his autocratic yet avuncular High Commissioner and the Indigenous locals under his faux-benevolent thumb. W...

Directed by Lee Chang-dong | 130 mins | 1999
Opening on a shocking scene of implied suicide, Lee’s sophomore feature proceeds to move backward in time, its reverse chronology following its protagonist’s unhappiness to its source, following him from the end of the ’70s to the close of the ’90s—yea...

Leaving September 19

Directed by Andrzej Zulawski | 124 mins | 1981
Banned upon its original release in 1981, Andrzej Żuławski’s stunningly choreographed nightmare of a marriage unraveling is an experience unlike any other. Professional spy Mark (Sam Neill) returns to his West Berlin home to fin...

Directed by Robert Lee King | 96 mins | 2000
The wholesome genre of 1950s beach movies gets a demented camp makeover in the parodic, perky-paletted story of Chicklet (Lauren Ambrose), a teenager who becomes a suspect in a serial killer investigation because of her multiple personalities. Screenwr...

Directed by Ang Lee | 105 mins | 1991
Tensions brew and language becomes a barrier when widowed tai chi master Mr. Chu (Lung Sihung) swaps Beijing for a new life in New York City, where he joins the household of his Americanized son and white daughter-in-law. Ang Lee’s directorial debut evidence...

Directed by Nina Menkes | 77 mins | 1991
Set in a drab, grimly coruscating Las Vegas, "Queen of Diamonds" again situates Tinka Menkes, the filmmaker’s sister, as an icon of womankind’s profound estrangement under patriarchy. Her character, Firdaus—the name borrowed from the unrepentant murderess ...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Wanuri Kahiū | 82 mins | 2018
Realized with bold, confident strokes in a vivacious palette, "Rafiki" is both the first Kenyan film to have been selected for Cannes and the first to tell a love story between women—a fact that saw it banned in director Wanuri Kahiū’s h...

Directed by Jack Hazan and David Mingay | 133 mins | 1980
Jack Hazan and David Mingay’s Rude Boy follows on the heels of Metrograph favorite "A Bigger Splash", their intimate observation of painter David Hockney’s artistic and personal struggles. Once again merging documentary and fiction, Rude ...

Directed by Ben Rivers | 21 mins | 2011
Founded in 1931 to provide employment for disabled ex-serviceman, Servex was a metal electroplating factory that sat on the outskirts of London. In 2010, after years of financial difficulty, the business went into liquidation. Rivers captures its final mont...

Directed by Sandhya Suri | 120 mins | 2024
Trained to take the place of her police constable husband who was killed on the job, young housewife Santosh (Shahana Goswami) is dropped into the harsh realities of rural Northern India and paired with a savvy, charismatic inspector, Sharma (Sunita Rajw...

Directed by Tsui Hark | 103 mins | 1984
This kinetic, ultra-stylish screwball comedy/historical romance/backstage musical by the inimitable Tsui—beautifully restored for its 40th anniversary—is one of the most zestily entertaining works of 1980s Hong Kong cinema. Kenny Bee’s nightclub clown and w...