Contemporary Cinema

Contemporary Cinema

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

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Contemporary Cinema
  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Grace Jones: Bloodlight & Bami

    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 pansexual glam-pop diva...

  • Il Buco

    Leaving October 1

    Directed by Michelangelo Frammartino | 93 mins | 2012
    In rugged Calabria, Italian speleologists explore the depths of the Bifurto Abyss, Europe’s deepest cave, reaching 700 meters below the Earth’s surface—their excavations drawing the attention of a shepherd on the nearby Poll...

  • 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....

  • Life and Nothing More

    Leaving October 1

    Directed by Antonio Méndez Esparza | 114 mins | 2017
    Spanish-born Esparza’s acclaimed sophomore feature is a delicately drawn, urgently emotional neorealist depiction of contemporary life lived at the precipice of despair, concerning a struggling single mother (Regina Williams)...

  • 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 ...

  • Long Day's Journey Into Night

    Leaving October 1

    Directed by Bi Gan | 140 mins | 2019
    Beginning as a kind of atmospheric, neon-drenched film noir fever dream, Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night follows Huang Jue as he returns to his hometown of Kaili for his father’s funeral, then sets off on the trail of an old flame (T...

  • 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...

  • 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

    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 have shaped the city f...

  • 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...

  • Unrelated

    Directed by Joanna Hogg | 100 mins | 2007
    Anna (Kathryn Worth) arrives in Tuscany to visit her school friend Verena (Mary Roscoe), Verena’s cousin, and her new husband—but to the dismay of all, 45-year-old Anna seems more interested in spending time with the trio’s teenaged kids (including a youn...

  • Western

    Directed by Valeska Grisebach | 121 mins | 2017
    Tensions rise during a work stoppage when a group of German laborers erecting a hydroelectric plant in rural Bulgaria suddenly find themselves with time to get into trouble in Grisebach’s patient, tonally precise, naturalist drama, which thoughtfull...