Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 15 mins | 2016
An unnamed Thai woman, both flâneur and researcher, discovers traces of her native country inscribed on Singapore’s urban landscape in this mellow essay film, conceived as a light-touch fictionalization of Suwichakornpong’s experiences during a...

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 Anocha Suwichakornpong and Wichanon Somunjarn | 16 mins | 2012
A little west of Bangkok lies Mahachai, home to a dense population of workers from Myanmar who eke out a meager living in the port town’s seafood processing factories. In unadorned fashion, "Overseas" presents a troubled ...

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...

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 (Isab...

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 Ben Rivers | 45 mins | 2010
Set in a distant future in which rising seas have reduced the Earth to a scattering of isolated islands, "Slow Action" draws on narration written together with science-fiction author Mark von Schlegell to conjure fictional utopian societies from real, remot...

Directed by Emily Atef | 129 mins | 2023
The golden hot summer after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 provides the backdrop for Emily Atef’s fraught and steamy May-December romance, adapted from a 2011 novel by Daniela Krien. On a farm in former East Germany, 19-year-old Maria drifts apart fro...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis | 101 mins | 2016
Davis’s documentary on the LA Rebellion, a surge of artistically ambitious, far-from-the-mainstream Black-American-directed films that came out of southern California—specifically, out of the UCLA film production program—beginnin...

Directed by Alain Guiraudie | 100 mins | 2013
Lauded and laureled at Cannes, Guiradie’s understated, simmeringly sensual thriller explores the proximity of Eros and Thanatos in an idyllic, lakeside nude beach/cruising spot—shot for maximum pastoral splendor by DP Claire Mathon—where regular Franc...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Amos Poe | 113 mins | 1981
A Pied Piper is terrorizing the city, luring victims with the sound of his saxophone blowing before blowing them away. A mood-drenched memento from Fun City NYC—invested with pungent ambience by future "Sugarbaby" DP Johanna Heer—"Subway Ri...

Directed by François Ozon | 101 mins | 2021
Shot on Super 16 and set on the French Riviera, Ozon’s hot and thorny tale of summer lovin’, with its soundtrack of sunny ’80s hits, is nevertheless tugged along by an undercurrent of tragedy. Aspiring writer Alexis, 16, meets David, two years his seni...

Directed by Kim Torres | 21 mins | 2021
Go towards the light. Torres’s debut short follows Lila, a shy teenager, who is lured from her online world of K-Pop dances in pursuit of a mysterious gleam, culminating in a metaphysical cyborgian encounter.

Directed by Olivier Assayas | 105 mins | 2024
Interpersonal tensions, neuroses, and nostalgia flare in the countryside cottage where two out-of-touch brothers and their respective girlfriends have congregated to wait out the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. With Olivier Assayas himself providing ...

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 9 mins | 2018
Dotted with striking statues of prehistoric creatures, a popular tourist destination in Thailand provides the setting for a gently surreal meeting of Thai and British history, and of two of contemporary experimental cinema’s key figures: Suwicha...

Directed by Clio Barnard | 91 mins | 2010
Andrea Dunbar’s first play, "The Arbor"—a grimly autofictional work about a Yorkshire schoolgirl who falls pregnant, named for the council estate where she lived—premiered in London’s West End when she was just 18. By her untimely death at age 29, she’d ...

Directed by Éric Rohmer | 106 mins | 1981
The inaugural film of Éric Rohmer’s “Comedies and Proverbs” cycle, The Aviator’s Wife is a fleecy farce of romantic overanalysis that finds the director exploring the possibilities of handheld camerawork in following a narrative expression of the opening...

Directed by Crystal Moselle and Derrick B. Harden | 93 mins | 2024
A compassionate, convivial, and deeply humane improvised comedy from Moselle ("The Wolfpack", "Skate Kitchen") and co-director Harden, inspired by the latter’s own experiences, "The Black Sea" stars Harden—also providing original...