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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, ... -
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
Leaving May 1
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. -
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), ... -
eXistenZ
Directed by David Cronenberg | 97 mins | 1999
David Cronenberg has never exactly worked in the register of naturalism, and his just-off, uncanny valley style fits this immersive virtual reality thriller like an UmbyCord in a bio-port. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law co-star in a mindbending sor... -
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 ... -
Ida
Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski | 82 mins | 2013
In 1962, in the Polish People’s Republic, novice nun Ida (AgataTrzebuchowska) is on the verge of taking her vows, but before she does she sets out to visit her only living relative, a promiscuous, hard-living judge (Agata Kulesza). Together they’ll e... -
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
Leaving June 1
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 sku... -
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... -
Momma's Man
Directed by Azazel Jacobs | 99 mins | 2008
After two delicate, scrappy features that made him a filmmaker to watch ("Nobody Needs to Know" and "The Good Times Kid"), Azazel Jacobs delivered a small-scale treasure that quickly became the standard bearer for a new generation of New York independent... -
Morvern Callar
Directed by Lynne Ramsay | 98 mins | 2002
A sensory odyssey packed into an intimate story of love, death, and theft, Lynne Ramsay’s second feature stays close to its impossibly distant title character, played with a transfixing inscrutability by Samantha Morton. Passing off the work of her suicid... -
Party Girl
Directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer | 94 mins | 1995
With her beguiling presence and spry, screwball energy, Parker Posey made her name as the queen of American indie cinema during its ’90s boom. The recently restored "Party Girl" captures an ascendent Posey in wickedly fine form as Mary, the to... -
Romance
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... -
Signature Move
Directed by Jennifer Reeder | 80 mins | 2017
In writing this zesty but tender rom-com, Fawzia Mirza—also the film’s star—mined her life experience as a Muslim Pakistani lesbian living in Chicago. Zaynab (Mirza) finds herself falling for the effusive Alma (Sari Sanchez), but isn’t ready to come ou... -
Simple Passion
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...