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 Dario Argento | 119 mins | 1996
Asia Argento, the director’s daughter and a future star in her own right, plays a detective on the trail of a serial killer, who takes advantage of her condition: entering an unconscious or fugue state upon encountering certain artwork. Infusing giallo ...

Directed by Johanna Makabi | 12 mins | 2021
Mbissine Thérèse Diop, the underrecognized star of Ousmane Sembene’s masterpiece "Black Girl," reflects on the challenges and realities of her role in an epochal moment in cinema, at home in her Paris apartment.

Leaving January 1

Directed by Morris Engel | 81 mins | 1953
A pioneering influence on the French New Wave, this New York independent classic follows a seven-year-old boy through the hustle and bustle of Coney Island after he runs away from home, spooked by a cruel prank. It’s filmed with close-u...

Directed by Nathan Silver | 70 mins | 2013

Twenty-five-year-old force of nature Natalia escapes a bruising relationship and lands like a tornado touching down in the lives of a best friend and a kindly shelter manager. Silver’s feel for the helter-skelter of existence and its volatility in the f...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Alice Diop | 97 mins | 2016
At the end of one of the corridors of the Avicennes Hospital in Bobigny, just outside of Paris, is a medical clinic for refugees: one of just a few in France, and the no-frills setting of this bracing piece of direct cinema. The dispassio...

Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 95 mins | 1983
After chronicling the LA punk scene in The Decline of Western Civilization, Spheeris delivers the affecting story of desperate teenagers—who adopt the moniker “The Rejected”—who squat in an abandoned house. Their violent struggles to stay one step ah...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Robert Lee King | 96 mins | 2000
The wholesome genre of 1950s beach movies gets a demented camp makeover in the parodic, perky-paletted story of Chicklet (Lauren Ambrose), a teenager who becomes a suspect in a serial killer investigation because of her multiple pers...

Directed by Allan Arkush and Joe Dante | 93 mins | 1979
The moptop Ramones liberate a school from killjoy Principal Togar (Mary Woronov) in this sweetly rambunctious romp starring P.J. Soles (Halloween) as lead rebel of the student body. The innocent music-fueled anarchy (directed by a veteran of...

Directed by Lucrecia Martel | 89 mins | 2008
Martel’s haunting study of self-deception follows Veronica, a beloved but remote mother, after her car hits something in the road—or was it a person? As the stylish “Vero” (the late, great Maria Onetto) drifts in a daze among family and friends, the ur...

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 Bette Gordon | 100 mins | 1983
A young woman lands a job as a cashier at a downtown porno theater, and soon finds herself inexorably drawn towards what’s happening onscreen—as well as other troubling fantasies. One of the great independent films of the ’80s, featuring a who’s who of t...

Directed by Éric Rohmer | 103 mins | 1987
Rohmer uses the amorous misadventures of two girlfriends in the Paris suburbs to test the old proverb “les amis de mes amis sont mes amis” (“the friends of my friends are my friends”) in the final episode of his “Comedies and Proverbs” series. Taking an i...

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 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 | 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 Joanna Hogg | 104 mins | 2013
Two married, childless fifty-something artists (Viv Albertine of the Slits and Liam Gillick) share an austere modernist townhouse and a crushing sense of ennui in Hogg’s third feature, a study in second-nature cohabitation that’s as precise in its rigorou...

Directed by Eliza Hittman | 82 mins | 2013
There’s not a single false moment in It Felt Like Love, Never Rarely Sometimes Always director Hittman’s feature debut about a sexually inexperienced south Brooklyn teenager (Gina Piersanti) who’s embarrassed to fess up to everything she doesn’t know abo...

Directed by Harry Kümel | 87 mins | 1971
Profoundly inspired by the spirit of Belgian Surrealist and Symbolist painting, Kümel’s darkly poetic horror film begins with a young newlywed couple waylaid at a grand hotel en route to England, where they fall under the spell of the elegant Hungarian Cou...

Directed by Frank Simon | 68 mins | 1968
Welcome to the 1967 Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant, held at New York’s Town Hall! Simon’s essential document of queer history takes us backstage to rehearsals and dressing rooms at a drag competition organized by Flawless Sabrina, and judged by a pa...

Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan | 157 mins | 2011
Against the majestic Turkish countryside, a roaming police investigation reveals more about the investigators and the tragicomedies of everyday life than about the foggy facts of the case. Ceylan’s gorgeously shot, masterfully paced story has a nove...

Directed by Éric Rohmer | 106 mins | 1981
The inaugural film of Éric Rohmer’s “Comedies and Proverbs” cycle, The Aviator’s Wife is a fleecy farce of romantic overanalysis that finds the director exploring the possibilities of handheld camerawork in following a narrative expression of the opening ...

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 Abel Ferrara | 115 mins | 2019
A warts-and-all semi-self-portrait of an ex-alcoholic artist in exile, Tommaso stars Willem Dafoe in the title role as an American acting coach living in Rome, dividing his time between teaching classes, attending AA meetings, and getting into increasing...