Directed by the Quay Brothers | 101 mins | 2004
“Absolutely entrancing!!!” Guy Maddin closed his "Film Comment" review of the Quay Brothers’s second feature with a tripled exclamation—a testament to the rare and painstaking artistry they bring to their signature blend of stop-motion and live act...

Directed by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson | 97 mins | 1978
John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, co-directors of Cannes Camera d’Or winner Northern Lights and fellow members of San Francisco’s Cine Manifest film collective, collaborated on this remarkable series of documentaries underwritten by the North D...

Directed by Marcus Lindeen | 97 mins | 2018
In the summer of 1973, a young international crew of six women and five men embarked together on a most unusual sea voyage—a close-quarters trip across the Atlantic from Spain to Mexico on a free-floating raft christened the Acali, initiated by Mexican...

Directed by Zhang Lu | 144 mins | 2023
Rich in gently rhyming motifs, Zhang Lu’s 2023 Berlinale competition offering orbits a food and restaurant critic in Beijing. Middle-aged and listless in the aftermath of a divorce, Gu Wentong finds himself contemplating a reunion with the father he hasn’t s...

Directed by Alexander Olch | 82 mins | 2008
“What if someone else wrote your autobiography?” That is the question posited by Alexander Olch as he tells the life-story of his former Harvard professor, the filmmaker Richard P. Rogers. For twenty years, Rogers worked on an autobiographical portrait...

Directed by Raúl Ruiz | 162 mins | 1999
“The best way to adapt something for film is to dream it,” quipped Raúl Ruiz. This apparently facetious remark nevertheless captures something of the feeling of the Chilean master’s lauded adaptation of Proust’s seven-volume opus, "In Search of Lost Time" ...

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa | 120 mins | 2019
This rare film made outside Kurosawa's native Japan is also some of the closest he's come to outright comedy. When TV host Yoko (J-pop sensation Atsuko Maeda) travels to Uzbekistan to record a new episode of her travel show, the country's unfamiliar ...

Directed by Jun Ichikawa | 76 mins | 2004
Jun Ichikawa is one of Japan’s least-appraised geniuses, and "Tony Takitani" is perhaps his masterpiece. This Haruki Murakami adaptation mirrors the author’s clear, precise prose with its study of a well-meaning loner, played perfectly by Issey Ogata ("Yi...

Directed by Gregg Araki | 79 mins | 1993
The first film of Araki’s “Teenage Apocalypse” trilogy, which the director once described as a “cross between avant-garde experimental cinema and a queer John Hughes flick,” "Totally F***ed Up" focuses on six gay adolescents who, rejected by their families...

Directed by Ben Rivers | 19 mins | 2016
Written by the science-fiction author Mark von Schlegell and filmed on location at the Biosphere 2 complex in Arizona, site of one of the twentieth century’s most infamous utopian experiments, "Urth" unfolds according to the logbook of a grad student—the la...

Directed by Philippe Lesage | 155 mins | 2024
Secluded getaways rarely go well in cinema, and the incredible concision of "Who by Fire" allows one to quickly surmise unease. Just how it does so, in its altogether surprising cohesion of character and incident, further proves Philippe Lesage a maj...

Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues | 67 mins | 2022
A queer musical fantasia unlike anything in recent cinema, Rodrigues’s 2069 love song finds an ailing monarch flashing back to his erotic youth as a fireman during a time of climate crisis, in which his beefcake blaze-battler (Mauro Costa) is tran...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 127 mins | 2006
Deploying another of Hong’s beguiling twice-told narratives, Woman on the Beach begins with the tale of a creatively blocked filmmaker and his affair with the girlfriend of his friend and sometime collaborator at a coastal resort, then follows the filmm...

Directed by Lucrecia Martel | 115 mins | 2017
A scruffy bureaucrat for the Spanish crown hopelessly angles for ways to get ahead in this audacious vision of 18th-century colonial empire, adapted from Antonio de Benedetto’s 1956 novel of the same name. Don Diego’s anti-epic progress in a far-flung...