Contemporary Cinema

Contemporary Cinema

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

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Contemporary Cinema
  • 99 Moons

    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-...

  • Animalia

    Directed by Sofia Alaoui | 91 mins | 2023
    Alaoui’s atmospheric and entrancing debut feature stars a superb Oumaïma Barid as Itto, a newly married and heavily pregnant woman from a rural Berber background who is separated from her husband (Mehdi Dehbi) and his upper-class family when extraterrestr...

  • Asako I & II

    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, ...

  • A Woman, a Part

    Directed by Elisabeth Subrin | 98 mins | 2016
    Sick of L.A. and sitcom success, actress and woman on the verge Anna Baskin (Maggie Siff) looks to reconnect with her roots in the New York theater scene. But the city offers no respite in this smart and restrained drama, the sole narrative feature by...

  • Blondes in the Jungle

    Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn | 48 mins | 2009
    As much inspired by "Degrassi Junior High" (1987-1991) as Warhol’s "Lonely Cowboys" (1968), Kalman and Horn’s kaleidoscopic 1987-set first feature has the titular blondes, a trio of heedless teens, plunge into the Honduran jungle in search ...

  • Crestone

    Directed by Marnie Ellen Hertzler | 73 mins | 2020
    In a world that undulates between fact and fiction, digital and physical, a group of SoundCloud rappers lives a solitary, post-societal existence in the desert town of Crestone, Colorado. Once a religious and spiritual mecca for many, Crestone’s ...

  • Days

    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.

  • Dream Team

    Leaving February 6

    Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn | 93 mins | 2024
    Making films together since 2004, Kalman and Horn have developed and refined a style that’s entirely their own, an idiosyncratic blend of ethereal synth-scored reverie, deadpan absurdist humor, sly sociopolitical observ...

  • Dry Ground Burning

    Directed by Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós | 154 mins | 2022
    In the Bolsonaro-era Brasilia of this incendiary two-hander—the second collaboration between directors Queirós and Pimenta—political resistance takes the form of an all-women gang who steal and refine oil before selling it on to bike...

  • Ema

    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), ...

  • Exhibition

    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...

  • Felicité

    Directed by Alain Gomis | 124 mins | 2017
    Gomis’s vibrant, tumultuous fourth feature follows Félicité, a free-willed nightclub singer in the heart of Kinshasa, whose life is thrown into turmoil when her 14-year-old son gets into a terrible car accident. To raise the money to save him, she embarks...

  • Fraud

    Directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp | 55 mins | 2016
    A family's home movies document a desperate crime spree and a bid to outrun the consequences…Or do they? In this meta-fiction thriller, an average family’s youtube videos have been edited to resemble something quite different. An extraordinary feat...

  • Hale County This Morning, This Evening

    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 and loving treatment ...

  • Lady Vengeance

    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....

  • Leonor Will Never Die

    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...

  • L for Leisure

    Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn | 73 mins | 2014
    Only ’90s kids will remember: in this affectionate but ironic throwback, structured as a series of piquant, deadpan vignettes, grad students on vacation lounge and mull over matters both petty and metaphysical. Captured on sparkling 16mm, t...

  • 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 ...

  • Love at First Fight

    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...

  • Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

    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...

  • Ma

    Directed by Celia Rowlson-Hall | 83 mins | 2015
    In this modern-day vision of Mother Mary’s pilgrimage, a woman crosses the scorched landscape of the American Southwest. Reinvented and told entirely through movement, the film playfully deconstructs the role of this woman, who encounters a world fu...

  • 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...

  • Parkland of Decay and Fantasy

    Directed by Chenliang Zhu | 101 mins | 2022
    Technology and spirituality are parallel forces in an abandoned and possibly haunted Chinese amusement park once taken over by outsider artists. If it is true that at the moment of death, consciousness sends out its last waves of thought into the univer...

  • Physician, Heal Thyself

    Directed by Asher Penn | 79 mins | 2023
    "Physician, Heal Thyself" offers a searingly intimate portrait of the celebrated expert on addiction, stress, and trauma, Gabor Maté. The documentary follows Gabor’s life’s journey, from his start as a young contrarian to a contemporary icon still strugglin...