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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... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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.... -
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... -
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... -
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
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... -
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 ... -
The Projectionist
Directed by Abel Ferrara | 81 mins | 2019
Ferrara’s fond, often funny portrait of Nicolas “Nick” Nicolaou, a Cypriot immigrant who got his start in movie houses working in the Times Square porno theaters in the 1970s and has held on into the 21st century as an independent exhibitor in spite of ov... -
Friends And Strangers
Leaving December 1
Directed by James Vaughan | 81 mins | 2021
In writer/director/editor Vaughan’s ennui-drenched feature debut, molehill difficulties—an impromptu camping trip, an ill-fated wedding video—take on mountainous significance for Ray, an Australian twentysomething living a cushioned l... -
4 Days in France
Leaving December 1
Directed by Jérôme Reybaud | 141 mins | 2016
Parisian Pierre (Pascal Cervo) impulsively leaves his boyfriend Paul (Arthur Igual) behind and hits the backroads of rural France in Reybaud’s droll, sexy road movie for the dating-app age. Pierre makes his way between Grindr dates ... -
So Pretty
Leaving December 1
Directed by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli | 83 mins | 2019
Two young queer couples in New York City—transgender artist Tonia and her American academic boyfriend Franz; transwoman musician Erika and her political radical transmasculine partner Paul—find their daily lives gradually mer... -
Stranger by the Lake
Leaving December 1
Directed by Alain Guiraudie | 100 mins | 2013
Lauded and laureled at Cannes, Guiradie’s understated, simmeringly sensual thriller explores the proximity of Eros and Thanatos in an idyllic, lakeside nude beach/cruising spot—shot for maximum pastoral splendor by DP Claire Mathon... -
I Was at Home, But...
Directed by Angela Schanelec | 95 mins | 2019
One of European art cinema’s most distinctive voices, Schanelec—Silver Bear winner for Best Director at this year's Berlinale—orchestrates a tense elliptical drama that’s part psychological close-up, part middle-class Berlin pastiche. Widowed mother-o... -
Marwencol
Directed by Jeff Malmberg | 82 mins | 2010
In Malmberg’s mesmerizing, multi-award-winning portrait of healing and obsession, Mark Hogencamp recovers from a brutal assault and alcoholism by building and tending to a miniature plywood town in his backyard. Populating the diorama with dolls based on... -
Futuro Beach
Directed by Karim Aïnouz | 107 mins | 2014
In this reflective romance from Brazilian auteur Aïnouz, a lifeguard (Wagner Moura) throws himself into a torrid affair with a motorcycling war veteran whose friend disappears in the ocean, but then struggles to find himself after traveling with his brus... -
Exit Elena
Directed by Nathan Silver | 72 mins | 2012
One of the great under-the-radar debuts, Silver’s sly comedy drops a twenty-something nursing aide (Kia Davis) into a suburban house where her kibitzing employer—played by the director’s scene-stealing mom—keeps drawing her into drama and chit chat. Show...