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...

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...

Directed by Lynne Ramsay | 98 mins | 2002
A sensory odyssey packed into an intimate story of love, death, and theft, Lynne Ramsay’s second feature stays close to its impossibly distant title character, played with a transfixing inscrutability by Samantha Morton. Passing off the work of her suicid...

Directed by Jill Sprecher | 96 mins | 1997
Like "9 to 5" (1980) before it, this crackling indie comedy introduces a set of disparate women united by the drudgery and casual sexism of office temp work. Augmenting the delightfully funny and subversive script by sisters Karen and Jill Sprecher (who ...

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...

Directed by Werner Herzog | 107 mins | 1979
Herzog brashly took up the mantle of German Expressionism in revisiting the unhallowed soil of Murnau’s masterpiece, with old foe and collaborator Klaus Kinski as the pestilent Count and Isabelle Adjani as the owner of the pale, slender neck that he so ...

Leaving January 1

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, rejecte...

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...

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...

Directed by Werner Herzog | 157 mins | 1982
The making of Herzog’s epic film about the endeavors of Irish entrepreneur Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski) to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle is perhaps as fascinating as "Fitzcarraldo" itself, as was stunningly documented in Les Blank...

Leaving January 1

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 (direc...

Directed by Scott Cummings | 30 mins | 2014
Smeared in gaudy face-paint and dedicated as much to the hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse as they are to generalized debauchery and destruction, the Juggalo remains one of fan culture’s most enduring—and most derided—outsider figures. In his experimental ...

Directed by Paul Morrissey | 99 mins | 1984
Brazilian diva Marília Pêra, fresh from her international breakthrough in Héctor Babenco’s "Pixote," is the queenly matriarch of a dope-dealing dynasty in Morrissey’s marvelous, grimly funny Alphabet City melodrama, concerning a turf war between rival d...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Andrew Bujalski | 90 mins | 2002
The first feature by Bujalski and a veritable manifesto for the lo-fi, DIY, radically modest “mumblecore” movement, "Funny Ha Ha" stars Kate Dollenmayer as Marnie, a 23-year-old recent college graduate in Boston still drinking like a...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Andrew Bujalski | 109 mins | 2005
Bujalski’s second feature stars Bishop Allen vocalist Justin Rice as a Boston transplant musician freshly arrived in New York, looking for new bandmates while drifting between a noncommittal affair with a radio station DJ (Seung-Min...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Thom Andersen | 173 mins | 2003
Los Angeles, so the story goes, became the nation’s movie capital in part because of its proximity to a variety of different landscapes, easily re-cast as other, far-flung places. But how has the city represented itself on screen? Tho...