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 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 ...

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...

Leaving August 1

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ...

Leaving September 1

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...

Leaving September 1

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. Wh...

Leaving September 1

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 ...

Leaving September 1

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 happe...

Directed by Raúl Ruiz | 267 mins | 2010
It is a rare thing for one of a filmmaker’s final works to rank among their greatest, and their most classically sumptuous—but such is the case with Ruiz’s sweeping, four-and-a-half-hour-long adaptation of Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco’s novel of...

Directed by Raúl Ruiz | 162 mins | 1999
“The best way to adapt something for film is to dream it,” quipped Raúl Ruiz. This apparently facetious remark nevertheless captures something of the feeling of the Chilean master’s lauded adaptation of Proust’s seven-volume opus, "In Search of Lost Time" ...

Directed by Nietzchka Keene | 78 mins | 1990
A young Björk makes her captivating screen debut in this stark, windswept fable, freely adapted from a Brothers Grimm story, about two sisters, one endowed with witchy gifts, who set out in search of a new home after their mother is murdered. Setting ...

Directed by Ang Lee | 105 mins | 1991
Tensions brew and language becomes a barrier when widowed tai chi master Mr. Chu (Lung Sihung) swaps Beijing for a new life in New York City, where he joins the household of his Americanized son and white daughter-in-law. Ang Lee’s directorial debut evidence...

Directed by Jafar Panahi | 106 mins | 2013
Panahi’s follow-up to 2011’s "This Is Not a Film", also a meta-cinematic chamber piece made in defiance of the filmmaking ban imposed on him in 2010, finds the ever resourceful auteur, typically indefatigable, in a melancholic funk. "Closed Curtain" beg...

Directed by Jafar Panahi | 97 mins | 2003
This early film by the Iranian master—a thriller in reverse, opening with the climactic jewelry store heist before flashing back to its inciting events—is lesser-known but among his best. In the central role, Hossein Emadeddin: like his character, a ment...

Directed by Jafar Panahi | 91 mins | 2000
Interweaving the travails of a handful of women in Tehran who, over the course of a single day, find themselves encroached upon in ways both subtle and pronounced by the nation’s patriarchal mores—with attention given to the difficulties of buying a bus ...

Directed by Bi Gan | 113 mins | 2015
Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan’s audacious directorial debut announced a major new talent. Shot in the mining village Kaili, the director’s birthplace, the film follows a country doctor who enters a dreamlike world where the boundaries between past, present, and fu...

Directed by Patrick Tam | 90 mins | 1989
One of the unheralded masterworks of the Hong Kong New Wave, Tam’s high-style “heroic bloodshed” melodrama stars Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Kenny Bee, and Joey Wong as friends bound by ties both criminal and romantic. With shamelessly pulpy plotting, luxuriously...

Directed by Tsui Hark | 103 mins | 1984
This kinetic, ultra-stylish screwball comedy/historical romance/backstage musical by the inimitable Tsui—beautifully restored for its 40th anniversary—is one of the most zestily entertaining works of 1980s Hong Kong cinema. Kenny Bee’s nightclub clown and w...

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 89 mins | 1999
It’s the close of the millennium and Taipei has emptied out with the onset of a mysterious virus, but Lee Kang-sheng and Yang Kuei-mei lag behind among the ruins, where maybe a last chance at communication lies through a breach between their apartments...