Leaving November 1

Directed by Payal Kapadia | 96 mins | 2021
An emotionally charged, intimate examination of the lives of Indian university students, Kapadia’s riveting documentary, winner of the L’Oeil d’or at the Cannes Film Festival, is built around a series of letters written by a student, ...

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 returns home to Chong...

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 Liu Jian | 77 mins | 2017
Liu’s second animated feature follows a construction worker who decides one day to double-cross his boss and make off with a large amount of contraband cash intended to fix his fiancée’s botched plastic surgery, initiating a down-the-rabbit-hole chase that le...

Leaving November 1

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 mo...

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...

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 leading lady Zhao Tao...

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 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...

Leaving November 1

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 l...

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 Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 114 mins | 2004
Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, this is the movie that gained Apichatpong’s distinctive, dreamy vision a new level of recognition on the international stage. A bifurcated narrative, with no clear connection between the film’s two halves,...

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 themselves forced to take...

Directed by Daisuke Miyazaki | 104 mins | 2023
Miyazaki’s tender, colorful, terribly charming tribute to headstrong youthful romance and the transcendent power of pop is inspired (and soundtracked) by musician Kensuke Ide’s eclectic, electrifying 2020 concept album—a record framed as being the wo...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Marit Liang | 4 mins | 2021
"The Visitor" follows Danielus’ journey as the young man makes a new life for himself in a foreign land where he does not speak the language and doesn’t know anyone. As Danielus, an unworldly wanderer, tries to connect with the locals, t...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Astria Suparak | 3 mins | 2021
"Virtually Asian" is a short video essay that looks at how white science fiction filmmakers fill the backgrounds of their futuristic worlds with hollow Asian figures — in the form of video and holographic advertisements — while the ma...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Laurence Lek | 60 mins | 2016
'Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD)' is a video essay exploring the parallels between portrayals of artificial intelligence and Chinese technological development. Lek combines elements of science fiction, documentary melodrama, social realism...

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...

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 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 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 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...