International Arthouse

International Arthouse

A selection of exceptional films from around the world.

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International Arthouse
  • 31

    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 lesson, forge a wind...

  • 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...

  • Animalia

    Directed by Sofia Alaoui | 91 mins | 2023
    Alaoui’s atmospheric and entrancing debut feature stars a superb Oumaïma Barid as Itto, a newly married and heavily pregnant woman from a rural Berber background who is separated from her husband (Mehdi Dehbi) and his upper-class family when extraterrestr...

  • 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, ...

  • 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...

  • Canticle of All Creatures

    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 himself in a lusciou...

  • 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,...

  • 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.

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Goodbye to Language

    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...

  • Hahaha

    Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 115 mins | 2010
    Two friends in a bar trade stories about their romantic exploits at a beach, which we come to realize involve the same people (including a restaurant owner played by Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung). Through adroit layering, Hong brings a wry sympathy to the ...

  • In Another Country

    Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 89 mins | 2012
    Isabelle Huppert plays three variations on the role of a Frenchwoman abroad in Korea in her first venture into Hong’s peculiar, soju-soaked world, and is the connecting link between the elements of this triptych of glancing, awkward romantic encounters wh...

  • Introduction

    Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 66 mins | 2021
    This devilishly deft portrait of missed and near-missed connections orbits a young man (Shin Seok-ho) adrift, sketching out his romantic and familial relationships in three parts (and a mere 66 minutes). Shooting his own feature for the first time, in bla...

  • Jesus – Der Film

    Leaving April 1

    Directed by Michael Brynntrup | 128 mins | 1985
    A punky black-and-white Super 8 telling of the life and afterlife of the Nazarene, this iconoclastic underground epic stars project initiator Brynntrup in the title role, seen in 35 episodes taken from the New Testament interpreted ...

  • Kalkitos

    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 supplied by sile...