International Arthouse

International Arthouse

A selection of exceptional films from around the world.

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International Arthouse
  • 35 Shots of Rum

    Directed by Claire Denis | 100 mins | 2008
    “It’s the best father-daughter movie I can think of. And it’s one of the greatest romances, too… The dance sequence to 'Night Shift' by the Commodores is not able to be described. We are witness to the most magical thing that can happen between two peopl...

  • Air Doll

    Directed by Kore-eda Hirokazu | 116 mins | 2009
    A Tokyo waiter’s sex doll (Korean star Bae Doona) comes to life in this bittersweet modern fairy tale from the director of "Shoplifters" and "Nobody Knows." Her wide-eyed wanderings bring out the loneliness of the metropolis—shot by Hou Hsiao-hsien’...

  • 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...

  • Alois Nebel

    Directed by Tomás Lunák | 97 mins | 2011
    Based on the trilogy of Czech graphic novels by Jaroslav Rudis and Jaromir 99, this black-and-white rotoscoped animation (of live-action footage) follows a train dispatcher tormented by his past. Set in 1989 when Communism ended in the soon-to-be-former Cz...

  • 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...

  • 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, ...

  • A Touch of Sin

    Leaving January 1

    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 re...

  • Backbone Tale

    Directed by Jérémy Clapin | 9 mins | 2004
    Clapin’s first short is a game of Tetris as much as it is a love story. It centers on a man whose spine bends at a striking right angle: his eyes can gaze only downwards, his hat perched on the back of his head. The appearance of a woman whose back bends ...

  • Boyfriends and Girlfriends

    Directed by Éric Rohmer | 103 mins | 1987
    Rohmer uses the amorous misadventures of two girlfriends in the Paris suburbs to test the old proverb “les amis de mes amis sont mes amis” (“the friends of my friends are my friends”) in the final episode of his “Comedies and Proverbs” series. Taking an i...

  • Cemetery of Splendour

    Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 122 mins | 2015
    Weaving together Thailand’s rich fundament of supernatural mythology and its often troubled national history, Apichatpong crafts a bewitching and seductive cinematic idyll, in which comatose soldiers suffering from a mysterious sleeping sick...

  • Christmas Inventory

    Directed by Miguel Gomes | 22 mins | 2000
    In this early work by the beloved and formally daring Portuguese auteur, the portrayal of a multi-generational Yuletide family gathering gives way to documentation of the season’s chintzy and charming accouterments: tinsel twinkles, baubles bob, and a Spi...

  • Claire's Camera

    Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 68 mins | 2017
    Isabelle Huppert re-teams with the Korean master for a light-footed comedy about a Polaroid-wielding schoolteacher visits Cannes and befriends a newly jobless woman (Kim Minhee). Their quick friendship sheds light on the meddlesome reasons for her firing,...

  • Colette and Justin

    Directed by Alain Kassanda | 89 mins | 2022
    “How do you make a film from the oppressor’s archives?” In Kassanda’s documentary, familial bonds anchor a historical investigation: the Kinshasa-born, Paris-based director probes the colonial history of Congo and its journey to independence, interweavi...

  • Damnation

    Directed by Béla Tarr | 116 mins | 1987
    Tarr’s first collaboration with writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai produces a quintessential Eastern bloc brew of voluptuous gloom and romantic doom that became the filmmaker’s defining style. The story of a hard-drinking man, the wicked cabaret singer he loves, a...

  • 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.

  • Dream Life

    Directed by Mireille Dansereau | 85 mins | 1972
    The first female-directed narrative fiction feature to come out of Quebec, Dansereau’s sensual and beguiling Dream Life centers on Isabelle and Virginie (Liliane Lemaître-Auger and Véronique Le Flaguais), two single young women who meet through thei...

  • 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...

  • Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl

    Leaving January 1

    Directed by Manoel de Oliveira | 63 mins | 2009
    In Oliveira’s rueful romantic tale, an accountant grows obsessed with a formidable young woman he spots in a window across the street, and tries to court her despite his uncle’s snobby disapproval. Ricardo Trepa, who was both Oliv...

  • Faust

    Directed by Jan Švankmajer | 92 mins | 1994
    Drawing on a cluster of iterations of the Faust legend but faithful to none, Švankmajer reimagines the tale of a man’s compact with the Devil through flights of dark, deranging fancy. The inimitable Czech surrealist deploys his trademark combination of ...

  • Film Socialisme

    Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 101 mins | 2010
    An essay on Mediterranean culture and history in triptych form that locates a new, scintillating kind of beauty in the digital image, "Film Socialisme" moves from a cruise ship of venal bourgeois passengers to a portrait of political struggle at a Fre...

  • Funeral Parade of Roses

    Directed by Toshio Matsumoto | 105 mins | 1969
    Part of the storied output of Japan’s radical Art Theatre Guild, Matsumoto’s dazzling voyage through Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood centers on two gender-nonconforming divas at “Bar Genet” but also doubles as a record of Japan’s avant-garde and subcul...

  • Futuro Beach

    Leaving January 1

    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 trav...

  • Gebo and the Shadow

    Leaving January 1

    Directed by Manoel de Oliveira | 95 mins | 2012
    Oliveira’s triumphant swansong turns a family dinner into a percolating drama of mortality and morality as a bookkeeper and his wife reckon with their estranged son’s thievery. The cast is a roster of arthouse legends: Michael Lon...

  • Goodbye, Dragon Inn

    Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 82 mins | 2003
    Like the Royal Theater in The Last Picture Show and the title movie house in Cinema Paradiso, the Fu-Ho is shutting down for good. A palace with seemingly mile-wide rows of red velvet seats, the likes of which you’ve seen only in your most nostalgic dr...