Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi | 119 mins | 2018
Between the international breakthrough of 2015’s "Happy Hour" and the sensation that was 2021’s "Drive My Car," Hamaguchi produced this beguiling romance, concerning a young woman and her affairs with, first, a self-dramatizing young drifter, Baku, ...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Jia Zhangke | 130 mins | 2013
Jia’s jarringly to-the-moment wuxia film, based on scandalous stories from around Mainland China circulated via Weibo posts, focuses on four individuals in four provinces pushed towards violence by rampant injustice—including one who re...

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...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 68 mins | 2017
Isabelle Huppert re-teams with the Korean master for a light-footed comedy about a Polaroid-wielding schoolteacher visits Cannes and befriends a newly jobless woman (Kim Minhee). Their quick friendship sheds light on the meddlesome reasons for her firing,...

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 Toshio Matsumoto | 105 mins | 1969
Part of the storied output of Japan’s radical Art Theatre Guild, Matsumoto’s dazzling voyage through Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood centers on two gender-nonconforming divas at “Bar Genet” but also doubles as a record of Japan’s avant-garde and subcul...

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 dr...

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 | 89 mins | 2012
Isabelle Huppert plays three variations on the role of a Frenchwoman abroad in Korea in her first venture into Hong’s peculiar, soju-soaked world, and is the connecting link between the elements of this triptych of glancing, awkward romantic encounters wh...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 66 mins | 2021
This devilishly deft portrait of missed and near-missed connections orbits a young man (Shin Seok-ho) adrift, sketching out his romantic and familial relationships in three parts (and a mere 66 minutes). Shooting his own feature for the first time, in bla...

Directed by Park Chan Wook | 115 mins | 2005
The capper of Park’s “Revenge Trilogy” follows a woman wrongfully imprisoned for kidnapping and killing a six-year-old boy, as she meticulously lays the groundwork for an elaborate plan of retribution, then sets it into merciless motion on her release....

Directed by Martika Ramirez Escobar | 100 mins | 2022
A festival favorite, Escobar’s debut feature offers a surreal, self-reflexive tribute to Filipino action cinema. Retired screenwriter Leonor Reyes (Sheila Francisco) lays comatose in a hospital after a collision between her skull and a televis...

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 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 mov...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Jia Zhangke | 126 mins | 2015
A simple love triangle between three young people living in Fenyang—Jia’s much-revisited and filmed hometown—lays the foundations for an epoch-spanning triptych, describing the past, present, and future of three characters (including le...

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...

Directed by Lupita Aquino-Kashiwahara | 110 mins | 1976
Groundbreaking in its critical depiction of the American military presence in the Philippines, Aquino-Kashiwahara’s incendiary political drama tells the story of a young lower middle-class couple (Aunor and Jay Ilagan) and their immediate fa...

Directed by Shinji Sômai | 118 mins | 1983
Adapted from a story by Leonard Schrader—yes, Paul’s brother—"P.P. Rider" is a cheeky, playful, and consistently surprising adventure yarn about three young friends who, having witnessed the kidnapping of their school bully, set out on a journey across J...

Directed by Lawrence Lau | 94 mins | 2000
Set in the massive, crumbling urban developments in Hong Kong’s New Territories with a combination of trained actors and nonprofessionals, Spacked Out depicts a few tumultuous days in the lives of four schoolgirls, filled with desultory mall outings, clas...

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 135 mins | 2013
Tsai’s devastating minimalist portrait of urban desolation, destitution and defeat is a gorgeous cinematic lament starring Lee Kang-sheng as a single father of two who ekes out a subsistence living by working as a human signboard while his hungry chil...

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 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 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...

Leaving February 9

Directed by Shinji Sômai | 115 mins | 1985
Emotionally raw, enormously tender and, finally, tentatively hopeful, Sômai’s breakthrough film—winner of the Grand Prix at the first Tokyo International Film Festival—observes a group of provincial junior high students who find them...