Contemporary Cinema

Contemporary Cinema

A selection of 21st-century films from around the globe.

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Contemporary Cinema
  • A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

    Leaving November 1

    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...

  • Around a Small Mountain

    Directed by Jacques Rivette | 86 mins | 2009
    Rivette’s swan song shows the French New Waver going out in typically playful style with a circus yarn starring the legendary Jane Birkin as a bohemian performer with a secret. A passing wanderer (Sergio Castellitto) is entranced by her family’s travel...

  • A Touch of Sin

    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...

  • Chile '76

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by Manuela Martelli | 97 mins | 2022
    Martelli’s directorial debut is an absorbing noir-tinged historical drama set in the early days of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. Aline Küppenheim stars as a middle-class Santiago housewife who is drawn into an anti-gove...

  • Ghost Tropic

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by Bas Devos | 85 mins | 2019
    After falling asleep on the Brussels subway after a long night’s work, 58-year-old Maghrebi cleaning woman Khadija (Saadia Bentaïeb) wakes up to find herself at the end of the line. and sets out to make her way home on foot, A city portra...

  • Girlhood

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by Céline Sciamma | 113 mins | 2014
    Set in the suburbs of Paris, Sciamma’s coming-of-age story stars Karidja Touré as Marieme, a 16-year-old who finds a sense of sorority, camaraderie, and mutual support when she joins up with an amateur “gang” of girls her age—much t...

  • Grace Jones: Bloodlight & Bami

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by Sophie Fiennes | 115 mins | 2018
    One doesn’t have to do much to make a film about the towering, tempestuous Jamaican-born Grace Jones visually stunning and frequently outrageous, but Fiennes goes above and beyond in this documentary portrait of the powerful and pan...

  • Hale County This Morning, This Evening

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by RaMell Ross | 76 mins | 2018
    The results of five years of living among African American families in rural Hale County, Alabama—also the setting of Walker Evans and James Agee’s photo-essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—Ross’s debut feature documentary is a lyrical a...

  • Have a Nice Day

    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...

  • It Felt Like Love

    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...

  • Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by Bruno Dumont | 111 mins | 2017
    Dumont puts a truly original spin on the Maid of Orleans’s origin myth in this headbanging rock opera, sung entirely a cappella to a synth-metal score. Eight-year-old Joan (Lise Leplat Prudhomme), fed up with the indignity of English ...

  • Lady Vengeance

    Leaving November 1

    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 mo...

  • L'Intrus

    Directed by Claire Denis | 130 mins | 2004
    One of Claire Denis’s most ambitious, complicated, and exhilaratingly daring films charts an itinerary traveling from the snowy Alps to Korea to Tahiti, following an old mercenary (Michel Subor, from Le Petit Soldat and Beau travail) in search of both a ...

  • Millennium Mambo

    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...

  • Mountains May Depart

    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...

  • Neighboring Sounds

    Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 131 mins | 2012
    Mendonça Filho’s entrancing debut feature tunes into the anxious frequencies of middle-class residents on a quiet seaside street in sunny Recife, Brazil, where a private security firm has been hired to go on patrol. The community keeps waiting f...

  • Night Across the Street

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by Raúl Ruiz | 113 mins | 2012
    The last completed film by Chilean master Ruiz is a melancholic memoir film, a playful puzzle box of a movie in which an office worker approaching retirement reflects back on his life—including events that may not necessarily have happen...

  • North By Current

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by Angelo Madsen Minax | 84 mins | 2021
    In this heart-wrenching documentary, a filmmaker returns to his Michigan hometown after his niece’s unexpected death and goes deep into reflections about his family, growing up, and trans identity. Recharging the personal-essay ...

  • Our Beloved Month of August

    Directed by Miguel Gomes | 147 mins | 2008
    Gomes’s magical mystery tour through the rich pageant of summertime Portugal blurs fiction and documentary as it chronicles a traveling family pop band, interviews with an array of folks in the country, and a fragile fictional love story. Gomes’s second ...

  • Pasolini

    Directed by Abel Ferrara | 87 mins | 2014
    The quotidian Roman life and the imaginary worlds of Pier Paolo Pasolini intermingle in Ferrara’s retelling of the final days in the life of the 50-year-old filmmaker, writer, and public intellectual in a lovely, haunting bricolage that includes text from...

  • Rat Film

    Leaving November 1

    Directed by Theo Anthony | 82 mins | 2016
    “There ain’t never been a rat problem in Baltimore, it’s always been a people problem.” First looking at patterns of rat infestation in Charm City, Anthony unveils the history of segregation, redlining, and environmental racism that ha...

  • Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

    Leaving November 1

    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 l...

  • The Girl and the Spider

    Directed by Ramon Zürcher and Silvan Zürcher | 98 mins | 2021
    An apartment move-out produces an exquisite ballet of curious personal dramas and fraught relationships (new and old) thanks to the whisker-sensitive filmmaking of the Zürcher brothers. Set amid nosy neighbors, it’s a fine-grained cros...

  • The Plagiarists

    Directed by Peter Parlow | 76 mins | 2019
    A deadpan auto-critique of the clichés of a soppily sincere American “indie” film, distinctively shot on a vintage television news camera and co-written by Wilkins and Robin Schavoir, The Plagiarists, a playful, provocative satire, depicts a heartwarming ...