Leaving August 1

Directed by Bill Plympton | 6 mins | 1991
With its pair of mute, suited protagonists trading increasingly elaborate blows, Bill Plympton’s Cannes Jury Prize-awarded short evokes the surrealist bodily harm of Jan Svankmajer’s "The Dimensions of Dialogue" (1982).

Directed by Andrea Arnold | 123 mins | 2006
Arnold took the Jury Prize at Cannes with her marvelously controlled feature debut, a tense, voyeuristic revenge tale set on a Glasgow housing estate, where a CCTV operator, Jackie (Kate Dickie), develops an obsession with a man who appears in her monit...

Directed by Sepideh Farsi | 88 mins | 2014
Ali (Vassilis Koukalani), a middle-aged Iranian man who has given up all hope for positive political change in his country, prepares to emigrate as Green Movement protests rage outside—but his isolation is interrupted when Sara (Mina Kavani), a young act...

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...

Leaving August 1

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...

Directed by Ari Marcopoulos | 14 mins | 2016
Evoking the spirit of postwar neo-realism, Marcopoulos sketches an impression of the Italian capital with unvarnished detail, capturing the quotidian life of a city where past and present collide. A lone roller-skater pirouettes beside an ancient canal...

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 Bill Plympton | 4 mins | 2008
Doe-eyed elves manufacture weaponry and snowmen goose-step into Lapland by order of a radicalized Santa in this twisted miniature fantasia, narrated by Matthew Modine.

Leaving August 1

Directed by Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig | 29 mins | 1976
A crucial piece of early feminist video art from the Les Insoumuses collective that documents a staged reading of would-be Andy Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas’s notorious misandrist call-to-arms of the same n...

Directed by Simon Liu | 14 mins | 2019
A hypnotic portrait of contemporary Hong Kong, Chinese-English filmmaker Simon Liu’s 16mm short is a city symphony that captures the urban infrastructure of his hometown in all of its enigmatic discord, as quotidian images of daily life are haunted by strang...

Directed by Jennifer Reeder | 80 mins | 2017
In writing this zesty but tender rom-com, Fawzia Mirza—also the film’s star—mined her life experience as a Muslim Pakistani lesbian living in Chicago. Zaynab (Mirza) finds herself falling for the effusive Alma (Sari Sanchez), but isn’t ready to come ou...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Danielle Arbid | 99 mins | 2020
To make an adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s 1992 auto fictional novel of the same name—exploring the author’s year-long obsession with a younger Russian diplomat—that is as bold and bracing as the source material is no mean feat. Putin-lov...

Directed by Ari Marcopoulos | 15 mins | 2019
The rhythms of tribal dance and street basketball commune in this diasporic summit, in which studio footage of famed Zimbabwe-born, New York–based choreographer Nora Chipaumire is intercut with teenagers hitting jump shots on a Manhattan court. The cit...

Directed by Jérémy Clapin | 13 mins | 2008
“I am exactly 91cm from myself,” frets Henry, the central figure in this Annecy-and Cannes-awarded account of a life uncentered. After being struck by a meteorite, Henry finds that he must negotiate to the material world—sitting in a chair, opening a win...

Directed by Andrew Ahn | 97 mins | 2016
Andrew Ahn’s remarkably assured debut feature is a portrait of forbidden sexual awakening set in the nocturnal world of spas and karaoke bars in Los Angeles' Koreatown. David Cho (Joe Seo, who won the Special Jury Award at Sundance for his breakthrough perf...

Leaving August 1

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—beginnin...

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 Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney | 91 mins | 2021
In the near future of Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s psychedelic sci-fi adventure, mild-mannered Dream Auditor James Preble (played by Audley) gets in way over his head when he’s sent on assignment to the eponymous Strawberry M...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Werner Herzog | 108 mins | 1977
Herzog’s longstanding fascination with cannibal killer Ed Gein drew him to shoot his devastating film of American dreams deferred in wild, wonderful Wisconsin, where a West Berlin street musician, Stroszek—played by Bruno S., the oft-i...

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...

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 Sepideh Farsi | 83 mins | 2009
Facing strict restrictions placed on filming by the Iranian government but eager nevertheless to capture the tense atmosphere in the streets of Tehran in the months before the controversial 2009 elections, Farsi began shooting with her Nokia cameraphone ...