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...

Directed by Cate Shortland | 106 mins | 2004
Shortland’s visually arresting debut feature, a standout at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival recently restored in 4K, follows 16-year-old Heidi (Abbie Cornish), in flight from a catastrophic fall out with her mother, as she posts up in the frigid Australi...

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...

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 Laura Bispuri | 88 mins | 2015
This adaptation of Elvira Dones’s acclaimed novel fully mines the psychological dimensions of the “sworn virgin”—Albanian women who follow an obscure law whereby, upon taking a vow of virginity, they may escape imposed domestic life and live as a man. Ma...

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...

Directed by Nina Menkes | 85 mins | 1996
Described by critics as her most radical work and by the filmmaker as her greatest, the fifth film Nina Menkes made with her sister Tinka in the lead—here, a Marine captain overseeing a murder investigation out in the Mojave—would also be their final colla...

Directed by Maryam Touzani | 122 mins | 2022
An ostensibly happy couple becomes unmoored when they hire a young apprentice for their caftan store in this layered, elegantly sensuous drama by Maryam Touzani, awarded the Cannes Un Certain Regard FIPRESCI Prize. Having long confined his homosexualit...

Directed by Jafar Panahi | 91 mins | 2000
Interweaving the travails of a handful of women in Tehran who, over the course of a single day, find themselves encroached upon in ways both subtle and pronounced by the nation’s patriarchal mores—with attention given to the difficulties of buying a bus ...

Directed by Claire Simon | 121 mins | 2016
The Competition begins, significantly, with the image of a locked gate—that of La Fémis, one of the most prestigious film schools in the world, offering hands-on training from working professionals and accepting only 40 students per year from hundreds o...

Directed by Philippe Lesage | 118 mins | 2015
Philippe Lesage’s fifth feature also marks his narrative debut, begetting an uncommon blend of atmosphere and storytelling. When a group of young boys are kidnapped in his suburban Montreal town, Felix, a fear-riddled 10-year-old, finds his wild imagi...

Directed by William Klein | 130 mins | 1982
“For me, this film encapsulates everything I loved and love about the tennis of that moment; and in the hands of the great and singular William Klein, it is at once a gripping sports page, a fascinating piece of reportage, and a work of art.”

—Wes A...

Directed by Arne Sucksdorff | 77 mins | 1953
Hailed “a masterpiece” by The New York Times when it opened at the Paris in 1955, this rhapsody of a film centers around life on a Swedish farm in the north of the country, with Sucksdorff himself portraying the farmer and his son as one of the boys w...

Directed by Nina Menkes | 38 mins | 1983
Departing Jerusalem for unknown, arid landscapes, the unnamed protagonist—played by Nina Menkes’ sister, Tinka, in the first of their collaborations—also drifts away, as if compelled by unseen forces, from her orthodox Jewish community and faith. This femi...

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 89 mins | 1999
It’s the close of the millennium and Taipei has emptied out with the onset of a mysterious virus, but Lee Kang-sheng and Yang Kuei-mei lag behind among the ruins, where maybe a last chance at communication lies through a breach between their apartments...

Directed by Dónal Foreman | 74 mins | 2018
An otherwise impossible conversation between two men of different generations, both filmmakers, is instigated via cinema itself in this probing and achingly personal essay film. Dónal Foreman grew up in Dublin, estranged from his father, the documentari...

Directed by Nietzchka Keene | 78 mins | 1990
A young Björk makes her captivating screen debut in this stark, windswept fable, freely adapted from a Brothers Grimm story, about two sisters, one endowed with witchy gifts, who set out in search of a new home after their mother is murdered. Setting ...

Directed by Gregg Araki | 85 mins | 1992
A raw, raucous, and at times brutally violent road movie, in which the reckless drifter Luke (mixed martial artist Mike Dytri) links up with cynical film critic Jon (Craig Gilmore), and the duo—both HIV positive, and both in kamikaze mode—hit the road to b...

Directed by Catarina Vasconcelos | 101 mins | 2020
A metaphor-rich magic realist metafiction memoir, Vasconcelos’s hybrid documentary debut feature tells the story of the filmmaker’s family history—in particular, her grandparents’ love affair and her commiseration with her father over the early ...

Directed by Kim Torres | 18 mins | 2023
Shot on shimmering 16mm, this vivid and dreamy portrait of the youth in the Costa Rican coastal town of Manzanillo—first known to Torres as the place where her father lived out his final decades—is set on the cusp of catastrophe, but animated by the visions...

Directed by Mikhaël Hers | 115 mins | 2022
Charlotte Gainsbourg exudes a warm and earthy magnetism as Elisabeth, a mother who must rebuild herself after her husband walks out on the family, in this tender, textural evocation of 1980s Paris. While working for a late-night radio program, Elisabeth...