Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour | 104 mins | 2014
Amirpour’s atmospheric, entirely original, black-and-white thriller gave an infusion of fresh blood to the venerable vampire movie genre, revolving around the figure of a mysterious, chador-clad female bloodsucker who exercises a powerful pull on a ...

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-up immediacy thanks ...

Directed by Michelle Handelman | 69 mins | 1995
A headlong plunge into the thriving “leatherdyke” BDSM community of ’90s San Francisco, Handelman’s film lets its eight subjects—all active participants in the leather scene—discuss private fantasy and public activism before the camera, as well as l...

Directed by Curt McDowell | 159 mins | 1975
Written by and co-starring underground legend George Kuchar, McDowell’s pornographic, polymorphously perverse epic is a gaspingly funny, proudly flamboyant camp send-up of the Victorian “old dark house” mystery in which eight horned-up men and women and...

Directed by Carol Stein and Susan Wittenberg | 56 mins | 1980
Old Brooklyn lives again in Carol Stein and Susan Wittenberg’s good-humored 1980 time-capsule documentary about a melting-pot neighborhood of Jewish Soviet immigrants, Puerto Ricans, and other New Yorkers—right next to Coney Island’s a...

Directed by Leontine Sagan | 89 mins | 1931
Actress-turned-director Sagan’s pioneering all-female cast lesbian romance sets its scene at a boarding school for military officer’s daughters where a new student has begun to develop an unusually passionate attachment to one of her teachers—and then f...

Directed by Jane Campion | 76 mins | 1986
A formally daring inquest into a fractured friendship from Campion with a screenplay by novelist Helen Garner, 2 Friends opens with once-inseparable teenage girlfriends who having drifted apart, then moves back through the years to observe the episodes th...

Directed by Kathleen Collins | 86 mins | 1982
One of the first feature films directed by an African American woman, and a charming, complex tale of personal discovery that follows the marriage between a philosophy professor (Seret Scott) and her painter husband (Bill Gunn), both at a crossroads ...

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, L, to her estranged ...

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 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 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 Gero von Boehm | 93 mins | 2020
Released on the centenary of its late subject’s birth, von Boehm’s fascinating documentary investigates the German-born photographer and provocateur Helmut Newton’s complicated legacy as the maestro of “porno chic” through interviews with muses like Cha...

Directed by Lina Wertmüller | 108 mins | 1972
The kind of potent cocktail of sex and politics only Wertmüller can concoct, The Seduction of Mimi stars Giancarlo Giannini as a laborer being wooed by both the unions and the mafioso while he runs back-and-forth between his hot-to-trot mistress and h...

Directed by Luchino Visconti | 179 mins | 1960
Set in Visconti’s ancestral home of Milan, his epic devotional tragedy centers on a clan who emigrate north in search of better prospects, only to see their close-knit family unit torn apart when brother Rocco (Alain Delon), rising in the ranks as a ...

Directed by Martina Kudlacek | 103 mins | 2001
Using footage from Deren’s groundbreaking experimental films of the 1940s—among them Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land—and interviews with Deren’s contemporaries, Kudlacek’s film provides penetrating insights into the mind of its legendary subject ...

Directed by Lina Wertmüller | 114 mins | 1974
A battle royale of the sexes/classes begins when vacationing socialite Mariangela Melatoand her Communist servant Giancarlo Giannini find themselves stranded alone together on a Mediterranean island in Wertmüller’s kinky, anarchic reworking of "The Ta...

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 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 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 Itsvan Szabo | 146 mins | 1981
In early 1930s Germany, an ambitious stage actor (Klaus Maria Brandauer) enjoys the greatest success of his career in the role of Mephistopheles—and his new fame will become his downfall, as he clings to the spotlight by becoming an eager servant of the ...

Directed by Halina Dyrschka | 94 mins | 2019
The Swedish painter and mystic Hilma af Klint was, for decades after her death, a nearly forgotten figure, but her coterie of admirers swelled to an army after a blockbuster 2018 exhibition. Dyrschka, in her assured debut, continues the crucial work of...

Directed by Lina Wertmüller | 116 mins | 1975
The comedy of errors begins when Neapolitan hustler Giancarlo Giannini inadvertently murders the lover of one of his septet of homely sisters. Worse luck follows, and Giannini lands in a concentration camp where, in order to survive, the practiced lot...