Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 131 mins | 2012
Mendonça Filho’s entrancing debut feature tunes into the anxious frequencies of middle-class residents on a quiet seaside street in sunny Recife, Brazil, where a private security firm has been hired to go on patrol. The community keeps waiting f...

Directed by Henry Jaglom | 88 mins | 1990
Notable in part for a cameo by Miloš Forman and the in-the-buff appearance of a pre-fame David Duchovny, Jaglom’s shaggy, yearning-suffused chamber piece uses a real estate mix-up to throw together the freshly divorced Drew (played by the director himself...

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 Kleber Mendonça Filho | 93 mins | 2023
A film that functions as a kind of memoir/essay film companion piece to "The Secret Agent", with the later film’s loving evocation of the largely disappeared Recife movie palaces remembered from Mendonça Filho’s youth, the diptych "Pictures of Gh...

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 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 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 ...

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 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...

Directed by Catherine Breillat | 99 mins | 1999
When Marie’s (Caroline Ducey) boyfriend loses interest in having sex with her, she engages a series of new and increasingly violent lovers—in pursuit of self-knowledge and perhaps a kind of transcendence through these acts of erotic masochism. Renow...

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 B...

Directed by Lou Ye | 126 mins | 2019
"Suzhou River" (2000) director Lou Ye sets this Hitchcockian espionage thriller in December of 1941, on the cusp of the Pearl Harbor attack. At its center, the inimitable Gong Li as a Chinese movie star who returns to Japanese-occupied Shanghai in order to app...

Directed by Henry Jaglom | 111 mins | 1987
This intimate meta-fiction, in which Jaglom plays a director who gathers a group of his single friends on Valentine’s Day so as to probe them for their views on love and loneliness, marks the final screen appearance of Orson Welles, a close friend of Jag...

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—beginning in the late ’70s...

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 Riders" stars Poe hi...

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 n...

Leaving March 1

Directed by Yuri Illienko | 96 mins | 1990
Released as the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union loomed, this adaptation of stories Sergei Parajanov wrote during his incarceration in the 1970s depicts the increasingly desperate attempts of a prisoner (Viktor Solovyov) to escape ...

Directed by Park Chan Wook | 116 mins | 2002
Fired from his factory job, the deaf, gentle Ryu finds work in the underworld—and begins on a path that will end in an explosion of visceral violence. A brutal, claustrophobic film of escalating desperation, illustrating with grim logic how an ordinary...

Directed by Béla Tarr | 439 mins | 1994
A cinephile rite of passage, Tarr’s magnum opus immerses us in the world of about a dozen characters in a shuttered factory town who are visited by a messianic figure but are also distracted by their own eyebrow-raising personal missions. Creating a rich te...

Leaving March 1

Directed by Ken Loach | 101 mins | 2012
Hewing closer to the spunky, good-hearted comedy of "The Full Monty" (1997) than one might expect from the director of "Kes" (1967), "The Angels’ Share" is a quaffable blend of Ken Loach’s trademark social critique and an offbeat crime cape...

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 ...