Directed by Jane Campion | 76 mins | 1986
A formally daring inquest into a fractured friendship from Campion with a screenplay by novelist Helen Garner, 2 Friends opens with once-inseparable teenage girlfriends who having drifted apart, then moves back through the years to observe the episodes th...

Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour | 104 mins | 2014
Amirpour’s atmospheric, entirely original, black-and-white thriller gave an infusion of fresh blood to the venerable vampire movie genre, revolving around the figure of a mysterious, chador-clad female bloodsucker who exercises a powerful pull on a ...

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...

Directed by Lina Wertmüller | 105 mins | 1974
Wertmüller’s wild, woolly working-class satire of the fantasy of upward mobility focuses on a cadre of Sicilian migrants living in a Milan commune as they struggle to make ends meet as kitchen employees while simultaneously avoiding unwanted pregnanci...

Directed by Gabriel Mascaro | 77 mins | 2014
Mascaro’s first fiction feature is a ruminative, subtly unnerving drama set in a backwater coastal village in northeastern Brazil, where an aimless young woman is jolted out of her ennui when her boyfriend becomes obsessed with finding out what happen...

Directed by Franco Rosso | 95 mins | 1980
At the outset of the Thatcher years, Black reggae DJ Brinsley Forde fights to make his way in the music business, while beset on all sides by the racism of the police, the National Front, and his neighbors. Rosso’s sound-system drama is hard-nosed, indign...

Directed by Derek Jarman | 79 mins | 1993
Over an unceasing, monochromatic blue frame, voices read a poetic text in which Jarman muses on his physical and mental deterioration as well as the endless implications of the color blue. Jarman, dying of AIDS, would be gone within a year, having left be...

Directed by Derek Jarman | 93 mins | 1986
A brazenly anachronistic and sensual imagining of the life of Renaissance renegade Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Nigel Terry), seen juggling two lovers (Sean Bean’s Ranuccio and Tilda Swinton’s Lena) while scandalizing the establishment. The debut fi...

Directed by Pedro Costa | 105 mins | 1994
Marking the beginning of Costa’s long artistic engagement with and commitment to his country’s Cape Verdean émigré community, Casa de Lava follows a Portuguese nurse and the comatose migrant worker (Isaach de Bankolé) that she’s volunteered to accompany t...

Directed by Luchino Visconti | 121 mins | 1974
The solitary existence of an aging art historian (Burt Lancaster) is interrupted when the top floor of his Roman palazzo is invaded by a vulgar marchesa and her entourage, including young gigolo Helmut Berger.

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.

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...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 70 mins | 2014
An innovator to the end, Godard’s penultimate feature finds him experimenting with the possibilities of digital 3D, using the technology to plot the disintegration of both a couple’s relationship and the images of the relationship. A film of unpreceden...

Directed by Atom Egoyan | 105 mins | 2020
Adeptly handling a knotty narrative that shifts between past and present, Egoyan is in fine fettle in this character-based work centered on Veronica, a high school teacher imprisoned for a crime she didn’t commit, and her father (a superb David Thewlis), ...

Directed by Aleksei German | 177 mins | 2013
The final film from German, a giant of Russian cinema who died before its release, is a headlong wallow in medieval muck, a grotesque epic adapting Arkady and Boris Stugatsky’s underground science-fiction classic which follows a team of undercover scie...

Directed by Ursula Meier | 98 mins | 2009
Isabelle Huppert gives a nuanced and fascinatingly opaque performance in Meier’s tragicomic tale of a fracturing family, with La Huppert starring as the uncompromising, iconoclastic matriarch of a clan that’s forsaken society to lead an idyllic, isolated ...

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 ...

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 (Tang Wei), traveling...

Directed by Lina Wertmüller | 120 mins | 1973
Country bumpkin anarchist Giancarlo Giannini arrives in Rome on a mission to assassinate Mussolini with the assistance of partisan prostitute Mariangela Melato in Wertmüller’s 1930s-set tragicomedy—but his resolve falters when he falls for Tripolina (...

Directed by Itsvan Szabo | 146 mins | 1981
In early 1930s Germany, an ambitious stage actor (Klaus Maria Brandauer) enjoys the greatest success of his career in the role of Mephistopheles—and his new fame will become his downfall, as he clings to the spotlight by becoming an eager servant of the ...

Directed by Pedro Costa | 95 mins | 1989
Shot when he was 29, Costa’s first feature is a story of two brothers forced to go on the lam after their father’s death. Shot in shimmering black and white, and developing an air of sumptuous fairy-tale enchantment, it stands alone in his oeuvre, worlds a...

Directed by Luchino Visconti | 179 mins | 1960
Set in Visconti’s ancestral home of Milan, his epic devotional tragedy centers on a clan who emigrate north in search of better prospects, only to see their close-knit family unit torn apart when brother Rocco (Alain Delon), rising in the ranks as a ...

Directed by Lina Wertmüller | 116 mins | 1975
The comedy of errors begins when Neapolitan hustler Giancarlo Giannini inadvertently murders the lover of one of his septet of homely sisters. Worse luck follows, and Giannini lands in a concentration camp where, in order to survive, the practiced lot...

Directed by Ursula Meier | 97 mins | 2012
Meier’s second collaboration with cinematographer Agnès Godard lays its scene at a posh ski resort in the snowy, scenic Swiss Alps—but instead of going in for stereotypical postcard views, Meier’s raw, wrenching Sister searches out the ugly underbelly of ...