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 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 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 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 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 fut...

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 Bi Gan | 140 mins | 2019
Beginning as a kind of atmospheric, neon-drenched film noir fever dream, Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night follows Huang Jue as he returns to his hometown of Kaili for his father’s funeral, then sets off on the trail of an old flame (Tang Wei), traveling...

Directed by Bi Gan | 22 mins | 2012
Before bounding to international prominence with his sui generis debut feature Kaili Blues, Bi Gan announced himself as a figure to watch with this lyric non-linear short, which tells the story of a small-town murder, and utilizes meticulous and utterly immersi...

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 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 Kazuo Hara | 119 mins | 2020
An epic group portrait of the elderly victims of Minamata disease who have spent nearly 60 years in Japanese courts fighting for recognition and compensation for their suffering from methyl mercury poisoning caused by corporate chemical dumping around thei...

Directed by Kazuo Hara | 138 mins | 2020
An epic group portrait of the elderly victims of Minamata disease who have spent nearly 60 years in Japanese courts fighting for recognition and compensation for their suffering from methyl mercury poisoning caused by corporate chemical dumping around thei...

Directed by Kazuo Hara | 115 mins | 2020
An epic group portrait of the elderly victims of Minamata disease who have spent nearly 60 years in Japanese courts fighting for recognition and compensation for their suffering from methyl mercury poisoning caused by corporate chemical dumping around thei...

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 Lav Diaz | 17 mins | 2016
Known for the titanic runtimes of his films, Diaz is also a master of the short form, as proven by The Day Before the End, a work of speculative, dystopian fiction set in the year 2050, as the people of the Philippines brace for an apocalyptic storm to thrash...

Directed by Lav Diaz | 143 mins | 2014
Diaz, in documentarian mode, sifts through the wreckage—human and otherwise—left behind following the devastating impact of typhoon Yolanda on the seaside city of Tacloban in this gorgeously shot black-and-white work, which focuses its attention on three chi...

Directed by Tran Anh Hung | 104 mins | 1993
The first film in Hùng’s acclaimed Vietnam Trilogy is a beautifully detailed, sublimely sensitive, and quietly moving evocation of midcentury Saigon—reconstructed on a French soundstage—depicting 10 years in the intersecting lives of a concert pianist, ...

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...

Directed by Bong Joon-ho | 28 mins | 2004
Completed by South Korean director Bong between "Memories of Murder" (2003) and "The Host" (2006) but never before released, Influenza captures the downward spiral of an unemployed 31-year-old man through Seoul's omnipresent CCTVs and observation cameras.