Contemporary Cinema

Contemporary Cinema

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

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Contemporary Cinema
  • 3 Faces

    Directed by Jafar Panahi | 100 mins | 2018
    Panahi’s fourth post-filmmaking ban feature begins with a smartphone video of a young woman (Marziyeh Rezaei) who, forbidden by her parents to pursue her dream of acting professionally, appears to take her own life. The video is addressed to Behnaz Jafar...

  • All About Lily Chou-Chou

    Directed by Shunji Iwai | 146 mins | 2001
    Incredibly prescient in its understanding of how a still-young internet would fundamentally alter youth culture, Shunji’s film introduces Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) in an ice field, the landscape gradually obscured by accreting chat room messages. Alienated...

  • All is Forgiven

    Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve | 98 mins | 2007
    Mia Hansen-Løve was only twenty-five when she directed one of the most striking and auspicious first features in 21st century French cinema, which finds the brisk economy of expression, nuanced characterization, and formal daring of her future films (F...

  • A Quiet Passion

    Directed by Terence Davies | 125 mins | 2016
    Emily Dickinson’s particular combination of intense brilliance and private, suppressed desires make her an ideal subject for the cinema of Terence Davies. Here, the atmosphere in the Dickinson family home is at first leavened by piquant but convivial r...

  • 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

    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.

  • Funny Ha Ha

    Directed by Andrew Bujalski | 90 mins | 2002
    The first feature by Bujalski and a veritable manifesto for the lo-fi, DIY, radically modest “mumblecore” movement, "Funny Ha Ha" stars Kate Dollenmayer as Marnie, a 23-year-old recent college graduate in Boston still drinking like a freshman and makin...

  • 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 bot...

  • 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

    Leaving November 1

    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 ...

  • Mutual Appreciation

    Directed by Andrew Bujalski | 109 mins | 2005
    Bujalski’s second feature stars Bishop Allen vocalist Justin Rice as a Boston transplant musician freshly arrived in New York, looking for new bandmates while drifting between a noncommittal affair with a radio station DJ (Seung-Min Lee), boozy sessio...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Team Picture

    Directed by Kentucker Audley | 61 mins | 2007
    Shot in Memphis, Tennessee for a cool $1,500, the amiably ambling "Team Picture" stars Audley—in his debut as feature writer/director—as David, a twentysomething whose total disinterest in anything beyond noodling on his guitar is cause for concern to...

  • The Black Sea

    Directed by Crystal Moselle and Derrick B. Harden | 93 mins | 2024
    A compassionate, convivial, and deeply humane improvised comedy from Moselle ("The Wolfpack", "Skate Kitchen") and co-director Harden, inspired by the latter’s own experiences, "The Black Sea" stars Harden—also providing original ...

  • 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...

  • 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 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...

  • This Is Not a Film

    Directed by Jafar Panahi | 75 mins | 2011
    Placed on house arrest by the Iranian government and forbidden from any further filmmaking activity for the following 20 years, Panahi used the slender resources at his command—his own apartment as a “set,” the aide of friends, including credited co-direc...

  • This Woman

    Directed by Alan Zhang | 91 mins | 2023
    Feminist activist and multihyphenate artist Zhang’s directorial debut is a raw, often revelatory docufiction experiment that follows Beibei (Li Hehe), a recently unemployed 35-year-old woman who, in the early months of the pandemic, finds solace from an unf...

  • Whisky

    Directed by Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll | 98 mins | 2004
    When Jacopo (Andrés Pazos), sullen, punctilious loner and owner of a decrepit sock factory in Montevideo, learns of an impending visit by his estranged brother, Herman (Jorge Bolani), returning to Uruguay from Brazil for the annivers...

  • A White, White Day

    Directed by Hlynur Pálmason | 109 mins | 2019
    Hlynur Pálmason’s second film opens with the Icelandic proverb that gives "A White, White Day" its title: “On such days when everything is white, and there is no longer any difference between the earth and the sky, then the dead can talk to us who are...