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, ...

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,...

Leaving May 1

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 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...

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 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...

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 Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 113 mins | 2010
Winner of the 2010 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Apichatpong’s film follows its fatally ill title character (Thanapat Saisaymar) on a final pilgrimage of sorts, traveling the countryside of Thailand’s rural northeast where he encounters long-lost lo...

Directed by Satoshi Kon | 86 mins | 2001
"Perfect Blue" director Kon continues to explore the myth-making process and the deceptions and confusions that go into the formation of a star persona in the brilliant, boundary-blurring "Millennium Actress". Begun in monochrome that slowly saturates with...