Leaving September 1

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 68 mins | 2021
The construction of the so-called “Death Railway” connecting Thailand and Myanmar, a Japanese initiative during World War II, was marked by perilous, inhumane conditions and an extraordinary casualty rate. Following four you...

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.

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 82 mins | 2003
Like the Royal Theater in The Last Picture Show and the title movie house in Cinema Paradiso, the Fu-Ho is shutting down for good. A palace with seemingly mile-wide rows of red velvet seats, the likes of which you’ve seen only in your most nostalgic d...

Leaving September 1

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers | 93 mins | 2019
Thai history and pre-history bubble to the surface and get packaged up for sale in this playful, surrealism-tinged venture from Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers. An unnamed woman arrives in the popular tourist d...

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 resu...

Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien | 107 mins | 2001
A seductive submersion into the techno-scored neon nightlife of Taipei, Hou’s much-misunderstood marvel follows an aimless bar hostess drifting away from her blowhard boyfriend and towards a suave, sensitive gangster. A transfixing trance-out of a mo...

Directed by Wei Shujun | 102 mins | 2023
After a woman’s body is discovered on a river bank in rural southern China, police investigator Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) finds that it’s only the first layer of a deepening mystery, bound up in the hidden life of the nearby community. Based on Yu Hua’s short n...

Directed by Ang Lee | 105 mins | 1991
Tensions brew and language becomes a barrier when widowed tai chi master Mr. Chu (Lung Sihung) swaps Beijing for a new life in New York City, where he joins the household of his Americanized son and white daughter-in-law. Ang Lee’s directorial debut evidence...

Directed by Lee Chang-dong | 130 mins | 1999
Opening on a shocking scene of implied suicide, Lee’s sophomore feature proceeds to move backward in time, its reverse chronology following its protagonist’s unhappiness to its source, following him from the end of the ’70s to the close of the ’90s—yea...

Directed by Lee Chang-dong | 133 mins | 2002
Jong-du (Sul Kyung-gu), just out of prison, very little reformed, and shunned by his family, finds an unlikely soulmate in the person of Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), a woman with severe cerebral palsy—and the daughter of the victim of the hit-and-run for whic...

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 ...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 66 mins | 2014
The progress through a hopelessly shuffled stack of love letters inspires the a-chronological structure of Hong’s Hill of Freedom, which describes the terse long-distance relationship between a Korean woman and the Japanese man who has built an ardent rom...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 127 mins | 2006
Deploying another of Hong’s beguiling twice-told narratives, Woman on the Beach begins with the tale of a creatively blocked filmmaker and his affair with the girlfriend of his friend and sometime collaborator at a coastal resort, then follows the filmm...

Directed by Tsui Hark | 103 mins | 1984
This kinetic, ultra-stylish screwball comedy/historical romance/backstage musical by the inimitable Tsui—beautifully restored for its 40th anniversary—is one of the most zestily entertaining works of 1980s Hong Kong cinema. Kenny Bee’s nightclub clown and w...

Directed by Patrick Tam | 90 mins | 1989
One of the unheralded masterworks of the Hong Kong New Wave, Tam’s high-style “heroic bloodshed” melodrama stars Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Kenny Bee, and Joey Wong as friends bound by ties both criminal and romantic. With shamelessly pulpy plotting, luxuriously...

Directed by Bi Gan | 113 mins | 2015
Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan’s audacious directorial debut announced a major new talent. Shot in the mining village Kaili, the director’s birthplace, the film follows a country doctor who enters a dreamlike world where the boundaries between past, present, and fu...

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 89 mins | 1999
It’s the close of the millennium and Taipei has emptied out with the onset of a mysterious virus, but Lee Kang-sheng and Yang Kuei-mei lag behind among the ruins, where maybe a last chance at communication lies through a breach between their apartments...

Directed by Jun Ichikawa | 76 mins | 2004
Jun Ichikawa is one of Japan’s least-appraised geniuses, and "Tony Takitani" is perhaps his masterpiece. This Haruki Murakami adaptation mirrors the author’s clear, precise prose with its study of a well-meaning loner, played perfectly by Issey Ogata ("Yi...

Directed by Sandhya Suri | 120 mins | 2024
Trained to take the place of her police constable husband who was killed on the job, young housewife Santosh (Shahana Goswami) is dropped into the harsh realities of rural Northern India and paired with a savvy, charismatic inspector, Sharma (Sunita Rajw...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 111 mins | 2024
In his 32nd feature, one of modern cinema's great artists achieves new modes of expression. Hong Sangsoo's "By the Stream" continues a career-long trend of making it look easy and achieving a-ha effects that never seemed possible, all couched in a seemin...

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa | 115 mins | 2002
Kurosawa's disquieting slow-burn focuses on Mamoru (Tadanobu Asano), a young, divorced father and employee at a hand towel factory who, with his co-worker and only friend, Nimura (Joe Odagiri), begins entertaining homicidal thoughts about their boss ...

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa | 120 mins | 2019
This rare film made outside Kurosawa's native Japan is also some of the closest he's come to outright comedy. When TV host Yoko (J-pop sensation Atsuko Maeda) travels to Uzbekistan to record a new episode of her travel show, the country's unfamiliar ...

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa | 134 mins | 2016
It's a classic Kurosawa set-up: forced to retire after a hostage situation goes violently astray, a detective retires to the suburbs with his wife, only to find investigative instincts piqued by a young girl whose family mysteriously vanished. Things...