All-Time Favorites

All-Time Favorites

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All-Time Favorites
  • The Woman Who Ran

    Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 77 mins | 2020
    Hong mines wisdom and wit out of a deftly presented and deceptively simple scenario: a young woman’s visits to three of her friends while her husband’s away. In insightful, unpredictable conversations with people at different points in their lives, Gamhee...

  • Goodbye to Language

    Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 70 mins | 2014
    An innovator to the end, Godard’s penultimate feature finds him experimenting with the possibilities of digital 3D, using the technology to plot the disintegration of both a couple’s relationship and the images of the relationship. A film of unpreceden...

  • Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

    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...

  • The French

    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...

  • Cemetery of Splendour

    Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 122 mins | 2015
    Weaving together Thailand’s rich fundament of supernatural mythology and its often troubled national history, Apichatpong crafts a bewitching and seductive cinematic idyll, in which comatose soldiers suffering from a mysterious sleeping sick...

  • Aguirre, the Wrath of God

    Directed by Werner Herzog | 94 mins | 1972
    The first collaboration between Herzog and Klaus Kinski cast the notoriously unhinged actor as the even more unhinged 16th-century conquistador Don Lope de Aguirre—nicknamed “El Loco” or “The Madman”—found embarking on his final mission: a frantic search...

  • A Bigger Splash

    Directed by Jack Hazan | 106 mins | 1973
    Jack Hazan’s intimate and innovative film about English-born, often California-based artist David Hockney and his work honors its subject through creative risk-taking. The improvisatory narrative-nonfiction hybrid features Hockney—a wary participant—as wel...

  • Days

    Leaving May 1

    Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 127 mins | 2020
    The parallel narratives of a middle-aged man seeking treatment for a chronic illness in Hong Kong (Lee Kang-sheng) and a Laotian immigrant in Bangkok (Anong Houngheuangsy) eventually, finally, meet in a moment of ecstatic release.

  • eXistenZ

    Leaving July 1

    Directed by David Cronenberg | 97 mins | 1999
    David Cronenberg has never exactly worked in the register of naturalism, and his just-off, uncanny valley style fits this immersive virtual reality thriller like an UmbyCord in a bio-port. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law co-star in a...

  • Made in Hong Kong

    Directed by Fruit Chan | 109 mins | 1997
    The first independent film released in post-Handover Hong Kong, Chan’s atmospheric shoestring-budget character study is a rough-and-ready piece of work shot on grainy leftover 35mm short ends in the city’s overcrowded subsidized housing projects. The resul...

  • Night and Day

    Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 145 mins | 2008
    Fortysomething Korean painter Sungnam (Kim Yeong-ho) seeks refuge in Paris and takes up with a series of fellow expats, despite a wife back home. In this classic from the 2010s, Hong casts an amused and amusing eye on the clueless Sungnam, expertly daisy...

  • Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

    Directed by John Maybury | 91 mins | 1998
    Long before Daniel Craig pursued a fraught gay romance in "Queer" (2024), there was "Love is the Devil": in this brutal but scintillating flashback to 1960s London, Craig portrays George Dyer, the petty criminal from the rough-and-tumble East End who beca...

  • The Big Sleep

    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 Lovely" (1975): Detectiv...

  • Hahaha

    Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 115 mins | 2010
    Two friends in a bar trade stories about their romantic exploits at a beach, which we come to realize involve the same people (including a restaurant owner played by Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung). Through adroit layering, Hong brings a wry sympathy to the ...

  • The Image Book

    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 is a labyrinth...

  • Stranger by the Lake

    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...