Leaving July 1

Directed by Miguel Gomes | 27 mins | 2003
What does Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution have to do with "The Wizard of Oz" (1939)? This is a riddle set up but not exactly answered by this endearingly lo-fi parable about two rich kids who, after getting mugged during a tennis less...

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 (...

Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun | 91 mins | 2010
The first film from Chad to feature in the Cannes competition, where it was awarded the 2010 Jury Prize, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s affecting, postcolonial father-son story is set against the backdrop of civil war, but flouts war film conventions. Ha...

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 ...

Leaving July 1

Directed by Miguel Gomes | 21 mins | 2006
This playful but sincere tribute to St. Francis takes the form of a cinematic triptych. From the present day, in which a guitar-wielding bard ambles through the historic center of Assisi, Gomes jumps back 800 years, reviving the saint hims...

Leaving June 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.

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 d...

Directed by Abba Makama | 102 mins | 2016
Not quite Nollywood: this ebullient feature debut—named for the colors of the Nigerian flag—puts a cannily satirical spin on a coming-of-age tale. When three friends, each from one of the nation’s major ethnic backgrounds, decide to make a movie, they wr...

Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun | 100 mins | 2013
The dancefloor is where 25-year-old Souleymane, nickname Grisgris, comes into his own—an electric, commanding presence, even with his paralyzed leg. But when his beloved stepfather falls gravely ill, Grisgris—played with verve by non-professiona...

Leaving July 1

Directed by Miguel Gomes | 19 mins | 2002
A short as puckish as the kids it depicts, in which a soccer game is rendered absurd by the fact that these self-proclaimed ten-year-olds are played by adults. In place of speech, they just mash their mouths together, with the translation ...

Directed by Cate Shortland | 109 mins | 2012
Cate Shortland followed her moody and startling feature debut, "Somersault" (2004), with another bruising story of a teen girl expelled from home—in this case, by history in the making. Abandoned by her high-level Nazi parents in the wake of Hitler’s ...

Directed by Fruit Chan | 109 mins | 1997
The first independent film released in post-Handover Hong Kong, Chan’s atmospheric shoestring-budget character study is a rough-and-ready piece of work shot on grainy leftover 35mm short ends in the city’s overcrowded subsidized housing projects. The resu...

Leaving July 1

Directed by Miguel Gomes | 23 mins | 1999
Two decades before "The Tsugua Diaries" (2021), Gomes would make his assured debut with another film that fused summer languor and simmering tensions with expertly deployed pop music cues. The teen love triangle of Meanwhile drifts from ru...

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 mo...

Leaving July 1

Directed by Miguel Gomes | 1 min | 2004
“Cinema is a game,” Gomes has said—a statement especially true of this briefest of shorts, a machinima that delights in the glitchy rhythms of the celebratory motions made by players in the Playstation game Pro Evolution Soccer.

Leaving July 1

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 ...

Leaving July 1

Directed by Béla Tarr | 439 mins | 1994
A cinephile rite of passage, Tarr’s magnum opus immerses us in the world of about a dozen characters in a shuttered factory town who are visited by a messianic figure but are also distracted by their own eyebrow-raising personal missions. Cr...

Directed by Olivier Assayas | 105 mins | 2024
Interpersonal tensions, neuroses, and nostalgia flare in the countryside cottage where two out-of-touch brothers and their respective girlfriends have congregated to wait out the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. With Olivier Assayas himself providing ...

Directed by Abba Makama | 95 mins | 2019
What’s the opposite of Afrofuturism? In Abba Makama’s lively and comedic low-budget fable, Raymond, a disenchanted Lagos security guard, wakes up as a masked mass of shimmying purple raffia: he’s been transformed into a traditional Igbo spirit. No longer ...

Directed by Shinji Sômai | 115 mins | 1985
Emotionally raw, enormously tender and, finally, tentatively hopeful, Sômai’s breakthrough film—winner of the Grand Prix at the first Tokyo International Film Festival—observes a group of provincial junior high students who find themselves forced to tak...

Directed by François Ozon | 101 mins | 2021
Shot on Super 16 and set on the French Riviera, Ozon’s hot and thorny tale of summer lovin’, with its soundtrack of sunny ’80s hits, is nevertheless tugged along by an undercurrent of tragedy. Aspiring writer Alexis, 16, meets David, two years his seni...

Directed by François Ozon | 103 mins | 2023
Who says crime doesn’t pay? For Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), the struggling actress at the center of Ozon’s fizzy, screwball-channeling caper, confessing to a murder she didn’t commit proves to be a canny career move. When she lands a plum ...

Directed by François Ozon | 114 mins | 2016
Based on Ernst Lubitsch’s sole dramatic talkie, "Broken Lullaby" (1932), Ozon’s finely wrought period piece unfolds in Quedlinburg, Germany, where Anna (Paula Beer) is mourning the death of her fiance, a soldier killed in the Great War. When a stranger...

Directed by Raúl Ruiz | 113 mins | 2012
The last completed film by Chilean master Ruiz is a melancholic memoir film, a playful puzzle box of a movie in which an office worker approaching retirement reflects back on his life—including events that may not necessarily have happened. A sublime swan ...