Directed by Catherine Breillat | 99 mins | 1999
When Marie’s (Caroline Ducey) boyfriend loses interest in having sex with her, she engages a series of new and increasingly violent lovers—in pursuit of self-knowledge and perhaps a kind of transcendence through these acts of erotic masochism. Renow...

Directed by John Maybury | 91 mins | 1998
Long before Daniel Craig pursued a fraught gay romance in "Queer" (2024), there was "Love is the Devil": in this brutal but scintillating flashback to 1960s London, Craig portrays George Dyer, the petty criminal from the rough-and-tumble East End who beca...

Directed by Andrzej Zulawski | 124 mins | 1981
Banned upon its original release in 1981, Andrzej Żuławski’s stunningly choreographed nightmare of a marriage unraveling is an experience unlike any other. Professional spy Mark (Sam Neill) returns to his West Berlin home to find his wife Anna (Isabe...

Directed by Pablo Larraín | 107 mins | 2019
Unlike some of the Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín’s tortured heroines—namely Jackie Onassis, Princess Diana, and most recently Maria Callas—the fictional Ema, the electric, bleach-blonde dancer at the center of this crackling drama (Mariana Di Girolamo), ...

Directed by Thomas Cailley | 98 mins | 2014
Adèle Haenel stars as tomboy survivalist Madeleine in this Cannes Directors’ Fortnight selection, a rom-com that packs a punch. Pursuing his crush on her, the listless Arnaud (Kévin Azaïs) impulsively enlists in the military boot camp she’s signed up fo...

Directed by Danielle Arbid | 99 mins | 2020
To make an adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s 1992 auto fictional novel of the same name—exploring the author’s year-long obsession with a younger Russian diplomat—that is as bold and bracing as the source material is no mean feat. Putin-loving Ukranian balle...

Directed by Jan Gassmann | 112 mins | 2022
Repressed pleasures and the blurred lines between lust and love are interrogated in this heady sexual odyssey, which charts the on-and-off relationship of eight-plus years between Frank (Dominik Fellmann), a DJ, and Bigna (Valentina Di Pace), a disaster-...

Directed by John Dahl | 110 mins | 1994
Skipping town on her husband Clay (Bill Pullman), Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) sets about seducing a series of men into abetting her lethal money-making schemes. The fact that this erotic thriller played initially on TV meant that Fiorentino was ineli...

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...

Leaving March 1

Directed by Peter Greenaway | 104 mins | 1982
Greenaway’s 1982 arthouse breakthrough, a 17th-century murder mystery in which an aristocratic wife (Janet Suzman) commissions a young, cocksure draughtsman (Anthony Higgins) to sketch her husband’s seemingly idyllic property while he...

Leaving March 1

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...

Directed by Stephanie Rothman | 82 mins | 1970
Rothman’s debut feature—and first production under contract with Roger Corman’s New World Pictures— co-produced and co-written with her husband Charles Swartz. Working under the particular constraints of the Exploitation genre, Rothman deviously inte...

Directed by Pia Frankenberg | 91 mins | 1985
A screwball comedy shrewdly observing the manners, mating habits, and class hang-ups of upwardly mobile 1980s West Germany, "Ain’t Nothin’ Without You" stars director Frankenberg as Martha, a filmmaker and single mother wracked with guilt over her back...

Directed by Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig | 29 mins | 1976
A crucial piece of early feminist video art from the Les Insoumuses collective that documents a staged reading of would-be Andy Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas’s notorious misandrist call-to-arms of the same name—the acronym sta...

Directed by Werner Herzog | 99 mins | 1999
Amidst insults hurled, tantrums thrown, and some literal shots fired, Herzog’s collaboration with the notoriously explosive Klaus Kinski produced five indelible films, from 1972’s "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" to 1987’s "Cobra Verde". “Every gray hair on m...