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...

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: Suwichak...

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 p...

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 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 of...

Directed by François Ozon | 103 mins | 2023
Who says crime doesn’t pay? For Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), the struggling actress at the center of Ozon’s fizzy, screwball-channeling caper, confessing to a murder she didn’t commit proves to be a canny career move. When she lands a plum r...

Directed by Roberto Minervini | 88 mins | 2024
Roberto Minervini followed his staggering Deep South missive "What You Gonna Do When the World’s On Fire?" (2018) with this heady time capsule from the American Civil War’s Western front, for which he took home Un Certain Regard’s Best Director prize...

Directed by Terence Macartney-Filgate, Stanley Jackson and Wolf Koenig | 30 mins | 1958
Montreal’s malls, churches, and clubs alike are abuzz with the Yuletide spirit in this beautifully observed short documentary—the inaugural episode of pioneering vérité series “The Candid Eye,” which aired on ...

Directed by Amos Poe | 92 mins | 1978
Described by its director as an “anti-homage,” Poe’s noir-inflected tale follows a French secret agent (Eric Mitchell), arrived in NYC on a mission whose exact nature is unclear, and targeted by enemies whose grudges are equally ambiguous. Shot with a mere $5...

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 Ande...

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 wh...

Leaving May 1

Directed by Mary Stephen | 20 mins | 1974
This lyrical film diary chronicles a westward “pilgrimage” Stephen made, together with her partner John Cressey, at the end of her studies in Montreal, in the summer of ’74. As she contemplates the impetus for the journey, her camera survey...

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 Lucrecia Martel | 89 mins | 2008
Martel’s haunting study of self-deception follows Veronica, a beloved but remote mother, after her car hits something in the road—or was it a person? As the stylish “Vero” (the late, great Maria Onetto) drifts in a daze among family and friends, the ur...

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...

Leaving May 1

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 84 mins | 2019
A cinematic collage, an esoteric essay film, a wide-reaching, freewheeling ontological history of the moving image, and a sorrowful survey of the fallen world at the beginning of the 21st century, Special Palme d’Or winner The Image Book...

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 documentaria...

Directed by Maria Maggenti | 95 mins | 1995
Coming of age meets coming out in this charming lesbian romcom, which pairs Laurel Holloman (later, "The L Word"’s Tina) with Nicole Ari Parker ("Boogie Nights") as two high schoolers who forge an unlikely bond: the former a tomboy on the social margins...

Directed by Ephraim Asili | 87 mins | 2020
Asili’s feature debut is a vivacious, fascinating, fierce and funny ensemble piece set almost entirely inside a West Philadelphia house in which a collective of Black artists and activists have convened, twining together their scripted attempts to arrive...

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 h...

Directed by Bill Duke | 118 mins | 1984
Having made inroads in Hollywood as a character actor, Bill Duke made his directorial debut with this raw and deeply researched made-for-TV movie set in Chicago’s stockyards in the early days of the Great Migration. Duke mines the volatile intersection of r...

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 17 mins | 2020
An artist and gallery staff prepare for the launch of a show that uses the winding vessel of the Mekong to play with concepts of spacetime and animism—much as this short does itself. It’s one of five shorts featured in the anthology film "Mekong...