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 mov...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Angela Schanelec | 105 mins | 2023
Winner of the 2023 Berlinale Best Screenplay prize, Angela Schanelec’s oblique but vivid film transposes “Oedipus Rex” to contemporary Greece—though Sophocles’ tragedy is here distilled beyond easy recognition, with the rigor char...

Directed by Werner Herzog | 99 mins | 1999
Amidst insults hurled, tantrums thrown, and some literal shots fired, Herzog’s collaboration with the notoriously explosive Klaus Kinski produced five indelible films, from 1972’s "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" to 1987’s "Cobra Verde". “Every gray hair on m...

Directed by Werner Herzog | 107 mins | 1979
Herzog brashly took up the mantle of German Expressionism in revisiting the unhallowed soil of Murnau’s masterpiece, with old foe and collaborator Klaus Kinski as the pestilent Count and Isabelle Adjani as the owner of the pale, slender neck that he so ...

Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues | 87 mins | 2000
The rare film to be both feted by festival cognoscenti and uploaded to disreputable porn sites, Rodrigues’s confrontational, controversial debut feature heralded the arrival of a major queer artist. Concerning the carnal odyssey of a Lisbon trash ...

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.

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 masochism. Renow...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Alain Guiraudie | 100 mins | 2013
Lauded and laureled at Cannes, Guiradie’s understated, simmeringly sensual thriller explores the proximity of Eros and Thanatos in an idyllic, lakeside nude beach/cruising spot—shot for maximum pastoral splendor by DP Claire Mathon...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Maryam Touzani | 122 mins | 2022
An ostensibly happy couple becomes unmoored when they hire a young apprentice for their caftan store in this layered, elegantly sensuous drama by Maryam Touzani, awarded the Cannes Un Certain Regard FIPRESCI Prize. Having long confi...

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...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 84 mins | 2019
A cinematic collage, an esoteric essay film, a wide-reaching, freewheeling ontological history of the moving image, and a sorrowful survey of the fallen world at the beginning of the 21st century, Special Palme d’Or winner The Image Book is a labyrinth...

Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 45 mins | 1999
Djibril Diop Mambéty, a towering figure in world cinema, is best known for his two features, Touki Bouki (1973) and Hyenas (1992, re-released in a new restoration by Metrograph Pictures in 2019). Yet these two extraordinary films tell only part of...

Directed by Jafar Panahi | 75 mins | 2011
Placed on house arrest by the Iranian government and forbidden from any further filmmaking activity for the following 20 years, Panahi used the slender resources at his command—his own apartment as a “set,” the aide of friends, including credited co-direc...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Alan Zhang | 91 mins | 2023
Feminist activist and multihyphenate artist Zhang’s directorial debut is a raw, often revelatory docufiction experiment that follows Beibei (Li Hehe), a recently unemployed 35-year-old woman who, in the early months of the pandemic, find...

Directed by Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll | 98 mins | 2004
When Jacopo (Andrés Pazos), sullen, punctilious loner and owner of a decrepit sock factory in Montevideo, learns of an impending visit by his estranged brother, Herman (Jorge Bolani), returning to Uruguay from Brazil for the annivers...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Cristian Mungiu | 127 mins | 2016
Nine years after his Palme d’Or-winning breakout—the abortion drama "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"—"Graduation" landed Cristian Mungiu his third major award at Cannes, this time for best director. He returns to the murky backwaters...

Directed by Cristi Puiu | 147 mins | 2005
Responsible more than any other film for establishing Romanian film as an international force, Puiu’s second feature is a scabrous satire of broken institutions that begins with the ailing elderly Mr. Lazarescu calling an ambulance, then follows him on an...

Directed by Hlynur Pálmason | 109 mins | 2019
Hlynur Pálmason’s second film opens with the Icelandic proverb that gives "A White, White Day" its title: “On such days when everything is white, and there is no longer any difference between the earth and the sky, then the dead can talk to us who are...

Directed by Hlynur Pálmason | 93 min | 2017
Winner of four awards at its Locarno premiere, Hlynur Pálmason’s debut feature introduces the traits that would come to define his future work (notably, the 2022 western "Godland")—fertile interrogations of masculinity and its entailing savagery unfoldi...

Directed by Maren Ade | 81 mins | 2003
Like her 2016 magnum opus "Toni Erdmann", Maren Ade’s devilish debut subjects its anti-heroine to a borderline sadistic ritual of ignominy. Melanie Pröschle (a fantastically game Eva Löbau), a 27-year-old schoolteacher moves to a new town, only to be assaile...

Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski | 104 mins | 2022
High school teacher Rachel (Virginie Efira) falls in love with Ali, and then with his 4-year-old, Leila— strengthening her desire to have a child of her own. But at 40, she knows that biology is working against her, and that cultivating a relationsh...

Directed by Lola Quivoron | 106 mins | 2022
“I was born with a bike between my legs.” Motocross-mad Julia—fiercely incarnated by newcomer Julie Ledru, cast from Instagram—butters up a man who thinks she’s a potential buyer for his machine, when in fact, she’s about to ride away with it. Revving m...

Directed by Nicolás Pereda | 76 mins | 2024
Three actors compete for a role in the same low-budget movie and for each other’s amorous attentions in this low-key but formally playful existentialist comedy by Nicolás Pereda. Deftly blending fact, fiction, and fable, the Mexican-Canadian director re...

Directed by Jacques Audiard | 115 mins | 2015
Like his 2009 prison crime saga "A Prophet", Jacques Audiard’s Palme d’Or-winning pressure cooker "Dheepan" centers on a man thrown into a new, insular, and hostile society. Sivadhasan, a Tamil Tiger soldier—played by Antonythasan Jesuthasan, whose ow...