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 Steve McLean | 87 mins | 1994
Based on the autobiographical writings of David Wojnarowicz and coming hot on the heels of the firebrand artist-activist’s death from AIDS in 1992, Steve McLean’s feature debut remains an underseen landmark of New Queer Cinema. Interwoven are fictionalize...

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 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 Allan Arkush and Joe Dante | 93 mins | 1979
The moptop Ramones liberate a school from killjoy Principal Togar (Mary Woronov) in this sweetly rambunctious romp starring P.J. Soles (Halloween) as lead rebel of the student body. The innocent music-fueled anarchy (directed by a veteran of...

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 Rodney Ascher | 103 mins | 2012
Among critics and fans, the films of Stanley Kubrick have inspired interpretations perhaps unique in both their range and florid intensity. (Alongside that of David Lynch, his career might offer the greatest argument for filmmakers saying very little ab...

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...

Leaving December 1

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...

Directed by Tom Kalin | 94 mins | 1992
Tom Kalin’s coruscating debut returns to the scene of the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case, likewise a key inspiration for Hitchcock’s Rope, but in this telling the unspoken homosexual undercurrent of the crime is put boldly front and center. A heavily ...

Directed by Kentucker Audley | 61 mins | 2007
Shot in Memphis, Tennessee for a cool $1,500, the amiably ambling "Team Picture" stars Audley—in his debut as feature writer/director—as David, a twentysomething whose total disinterest in anything beyond noodling on his guitar is cause for concern to...

Directed by Signe Baumane | 4 mins | 2008
It is a take on sex from a woman’s point of view. Shocking!

Directed by George A. Romero | 53 mins | 1975
The circumstances of this George A. Romero curio are as bizarre as the film itself. Commissioned as an educational video by a Lutheran organization, "The Amusement Park" screened just once at its 1975 premiere and, for over four decades, was considere...

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 ...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Michael Winner | 99 mins | 1978
The second screen adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel transposes the notably labyrinthine plot to 1970s London, with a deliciously weathered Robert Mitchum reprising the iconic role he’d recently assumed in "Farewell, My Love...

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 ...

Leaving December 1

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 confi...

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 Cristi Puiu | 147 mins | 2005
Responsible more than any other film for establishing Romanian film as an international force, Puiu’s second feature is a scabrous satire of broken institutions that begins with the ailing elderly Mr. Lazarescu calling an ambulance, then follows him on an...

Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 100 mins | 1981
Without doubt one of the great rock docs, Penelope Spheeris’s headily discordant portrait of West Coast punk—her directorial debut—showcases such hardcore luminaries as X, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Germs. As pure and pungent a time capsule as th...

Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 93 mins | 1988
The scummy, lightening-in-a-bottle Los Angeles punk scene that Penelope Spheeris captured in the first “Decline of Western Civilization” (1981) had morphed considerably by the time of this second instalment, nearly a decade later: the hair was bigger...