Contemporary Cinema

Contemporary Cinema

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

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Contemporary Cinema
  • 99 Moons

    Leaving August 1

    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 ...

  • 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, ...

  • 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.

  • 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...

  • Hale County This Morning, This Evening

    Leaving August 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 and...

  • 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....

  • 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

    Leaving August 1

    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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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

    Leaving August 1

    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-lov...

  • Spa Night

    Directed by Andrew Ahn | 97 mins | 2016
    Andrew Ahn’s remarkably assured debut feature is a portrait of forbidden sexual awakening set in the nocturnal world of spas and karaoke bars in Los Angeles' Koreatown. David Cho (Joe Seo, who won the Special Jury Award at Sundance for his breakthrough perf...

  • Strawberry Mansion

    Directed by Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney | 91 mins | 2021
    In the near future of Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s psychedelic sci-fi adventure, mild-mannered Dream Auditor James Preble (played by Audley) gets in way over his head when he’s sent on assignment to the eponymous Strawberry M...

  • 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 Arbor

    Directed by Clio Barnard | 91 mins | 2010
    Andrea Dunbar’s first play, "The Arbor"—a grimly autofictional work about a Yorkshire schoolgirl who falls pregnant, named for the council estate where she lived—premiered in London’s West End when she was just 18. By her untimely death at age 29, she’d p...

  • Transit

    Directed by Christian Petzold | 101 mins | 2018
    The first fraught and steamy pairing of Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski by acclaimed writer-director Christian Petzold—followed by 2020’s "Undine"—proved one of the best films of 2018, and a breakthrough for the beguiling Rogowski. Building on themes ...

  • The Paperboy

    Directed by Lee Daniels | 107 mins | 2012
    Each shedding their actorly comfort zones, stars Matthew McConnaughey, Zac Efron, Nicole Kidman and John Cusack strike out for the Florida swamps in this heady and lurid sixties-set noir. They orbit an alleged murder by Cusack’s rough-hewn alligator hunte...

  • The Neon Bible

    Directed by Terence Davies | 92 mins | 1995
    Based on John Kennedy Toole’s Southern Gothic Bildungsroman, Terence Davies’ third feature is both his first adaptation and his first set outside England, but feels just as steeped in heady memory as his earlier works. His vision of 1940s rural Georgia ...

  • The Deep Blue Sea

    Directed by Terence Davies | 99 mins | 2011
    In a tour de force performance, Rachel Weisz plays a woman brought to breaking point after shunning her husband, a High Court judge (Simon Russell Beale), in order to pursue a passionate affair with a dashing but troubled former RAF pilot (Tom Hiddlesto...