All-Time Favorites
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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 A...
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Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?
Directed by Henry Jaglom | 90 mins | 1983
The fleet, dryly funny fourth feature from independent cinema stalwart Henry Jaglom stars a riveting Karen Black—who also composed music for the film—as Zee, a middle-aged Upper West Sider, who, reeling after being abandoned by her husband, pursues an am... -
Farewell My Concubine
Leaving June 1
Directed by Kaige Chen | 171 mins | 1993
Art and life become inextricably entwined in Chen’s gorgeously arrayed triumph of costume and production design: an epic spanning 50 years of 20th-century Chinese history in the life of a troupe of Peking opera actors based on the 1985 L... -
Suspended Time
Directed by Olivier Assayas | 105 mins | 2024
Interpersonal tensions, neuroses, and nostalgia flare in the countryside cottage where two out-of-touch brothers and their respective girlfriends have congregated to wait out the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. With Olivier Assayas himself providing ... -
A Woman, a Part
Directed by Elisabeth Subrin | 98 mins | 2016
Sick of L.A. and sitcom success, actress and woman on the verge Anna Baskin (Maggie Siff) looks to reconnect with her roots in the New York theater scene. But the city offers no respite in this smart and restrained drama, the sole narrative feature b... -
I'm Not Everything I Want to Be
Directed by Klára Tasovská | 90 mins | 2024
Oft referred to as the Nan Goldin of Czechoslovakia, Libuše Jarcovjáková chronicled after-dark Prague in the 1970s and ’80s, her photographs of let-it-all-hang-out gay clubs, factory hands working the third shift, and clandestine parties giving a pictu... -
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Directed by RaMell Ross | 76 mins | 2018
The results of five years of living among African American families in rural Hale County, Alabama—also the setting of Walker Evans and James Agee’s photo-essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—Ross’s debut feature documentary is a lyrical and loving treatment... -
Saturday Fiction
Directed by Lou Ye | 126 mins | 2019
"Suzhou River" (2000) director Lou Ye sets this Hitchcockian espionage thriller in December of 1941, on the cusp of the Pearl Harbor attack. At its center, the inimitable Gong Li as a Chinese movie star who returns to Japanese-occupied Shanghai in order to ap... -
Duet for Cannibals
Directed by Susan Sontag | 105 mins | 1969
In the late ’60s, a Swedish studio invited essayist, novelist, critic, cinephile, and all-around intellectual dynamo Susan Sontag to make her directorial debut in Stockholm. The resulting film, revolving around the quadrangular relationship between an a... -
The Competition
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 o... -
The Crime is Mine
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 ... -
Apolonia, Apolonia
Directed by Lea Glob | 116 mins | 2022
With her intense gaze and assured manner, the artist who gives Lea Glob’s documentary its title, a French painter born into the Parisian counterculture, is a figure of considerable magnetism. Filmed over the course of 13 years, from Apolonia’s early twentie... -
Zama
Leaving March 1
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 pro... -
The Headless Woman
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 u... -
31
Directed by Miguel Gomes | 27 mins | 2003
What does Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution have to do with "The Wizard of Oz" (1939)? This is a riddle set up but not exactly answered by this endearingly lo-fi parable about two rich kids who, after getting mugged during a tennis lesson, forge a win... -
If Found
Directed by India Donaldson | 8 mins | 2021
Set in an off-season beach town emptied out for the winter, Donaldson’s by turns unsettling and comic short is a deft character study done in small, precise strokes, following a troubled, lonesome, dog-obsessed woman who decides to take extralegal meas...