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...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Antonio Santini | 90 mins | 2014
With nods to "Paris Is Burning" and the films of Pedro Almodóvar, directors Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles craft a bold and richly affecting document of what it means to be transgender in twenty-first century Puerto Rico. Through t...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Želimir Žilnik | 84 mins | 1995
Žilnik, one of the great, insubordinate talents to emerge from the Yugoslavian “Black Wave” of the 1960s and ’70s, who’d seen his work politically suppressed, took advantage of new permissiveness to produce this raunchy, raucous, and...

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 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...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Angela Schanelec | 105 mins | 2023
Winner of the 2023 Berlinale Best Screenplay prize, Angela Schanelec’s oblique but vivid film transposes “Oedipus Rex” to contemporary Greece—though Sophocles’ tragedy is here distilled beyond easy recognition, with the rigor char...

Directed by Andrew Bujalski | 109 mins | 2005
Bujalski’s second feature stars Bishop Allen vocalist Justin Rice as a Boston transplant musician freshly arrived in New York, looking for new bandmates while drifting between a noncommittal affair with a radio station DJ (Seung-Min Lee), boozy sessio...

Directed by Werner Herzog | 99 mins | 1999
Amidst insults hurled, tantrums thrown, and some literal shots fired, Herzog’s collaboration with the notoriously explosive Klaus Kinski produced five indelible films, from 1972’s "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" to 1987’s "Cobra Verde". “Every gray hair on m...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Guy Maddin | 80 mins | 2007
“For my entire life,” says Guy Maddin in a Metrograph Journal conversation, “I felt Winnipeg was a big donut hole in the center of the continent, that all the Hollywood films and TV shows that I grew up watching did not acknowledge its e...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew | 28 mins | 2019
A twenty-something gay man develops a relationship over text messages with a stranger he meets on a dating app. Their exchange becomes increasingly intimate as the protagonist navigates life as an architect in New Yor...

Directed by Perry Henzell | 89 mins | 2006
Perry Henzell’s follow-up to "The Harder They Come" (1972) very nearly never saw the light of day: funding dried up before its completion, and then the footage was lost. Rediscovered by chance in 2006 and restored in 2019—nearly half a century after the ...

Directed by Werner Herzog | 107 mins | 1979
Herzog brashly took up the mantle of German Expressionism in revisiting the unhallowed soil of Murnau’s masterpiece, with old foe and collaborator Klaus Kinski as the pestilent Count and Isabelle Adjani as the owner of the pale, slender neck that he so ...

Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues | 87 mins | 2000
The rare film to be both feted by festival cognoscenti and uploaded to disreputable porn sites, Rodrigues’s confrontational, controversial debut feature heralded the arrival of a major queer artist. Concerning the carnal odyssey of a Lisbon trash ...

Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski | 104 mins | 2022
High school teacher Rachel (Virginie Efira) falls in love with Ali, and then with his 4-year-old, Leila— strengthening her desire to have a child of her own. But at 40, she knows that biology is working against her, and that cultivating a relationsh...

Directed by Todd Haynes | 85 mins | 1991
With his first feature, Haynes took his influence from the patron saint of all queer outlaw art, the French writer and director Jean Genet. The result, a landmark of New Queer Cinema, was a trio of intercut, stylistically distinct stories drawn together by...

Directed by Shirley Clarke | 107 mins | 1967
A distillation of a single 12-hour interview in a room at the Chelsea Hotel with the charismatic Jason Holliday (“real” name Aaron Payne), a gay, African American cabaret dancer, part-time hustler, and full-time raconteur, Portrait of Jason grows from ...

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 find his wife Anna (Isabe...

Directed by Steve McLean | 87 mins | 1994
Based on the autobiographical writings of David Wojnarowicz and coming hot on the heels of the firebrand artist-activist’s death from AIDS in 1992, Steve McLean’s feature debut remains an underseen landmark of New Queer Cinema. Interwoven are fictionalize...

Directed by Miguel Gomes | 1 min | 2004
“Cinema is a game,” Gomes has said—a statement especially true of this briefest of shorts, a machinima that delights in the glitchy rhythms of the celebratory motions made by players in the Playstation game Pro Evolution Soccer.

Directed by David Cronenberg | 91 mins | 1977
Like the mutant stinger that sprouts from Marilyn Chambers’ armpit, David Cronenberg burst onto the scene with the one-two punch of “Shivers” (1975) and “Rabid.” In his second feature—which rapidly became one of the highest-grossing Canadian films eve...

Directed by Allan Arkush and Joe Dante | 93 mins | 1979
The moptop Ramones liberate a school from killjoy Principal Togar (Mary Woronov) in this sweetly rambunctious romp starring P.J. Soles (Halloween) as lead rebel of the student body. The innocent music-fueled anarchy (directed by a veteran of...

Directed by Signe Baumane | 89 mins | 2014
Armed with a surrealist sensibility and a wicked sense of humor, New York-based Latvian animator Signe Baumane has long probed the thorny parts of life as a woman. Here, hand-drawn imagery combines with papier-mache sets and stop-motion techniques in an ...

Directed by Lola Quivoron | 106 mins | 2022
“I was born with a bike between my legs.” Motocross-mad Julia—fiercely incarnated by newcomer Julie Ledru, cast from Instagram—butters up a man who thinks she’s a potential buyer for his machine, when in fact, she’s about to ride away with it. Revving m...