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 resul...

Directed by Antonio Santini | 90 mins | 2014
With nods to "Paris Is Burning" and the films of Pedro Almodóvar, directors Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles craft a bold and richly affecting document of what it means to be transgender in twenty-first century Puerto Rico. Through the personal journeys...

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 rugby training to ...

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...

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 characteristic of the qu...

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...

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—where regular Franc...

Directed by Park Chan Wook | 116 mins | 2002
Fired from his factory job, the deaf, gentle Ryu finds work in the underworld—and begins on a path that will end in an explosion of visceral violence. A brutal, claustrophobic film of escalating desperation, illustrating with grim logic how an ordinary...

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 confined his homosexualit...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Veit Helmer | 90 mins | 2018
In this charmingly absurdist Cinderella riff from German writer-director Veit Helmer, Chichikova features alongside such international luminaries as Paz Vega, Denis Lavant, and "Underground" star Miki Manojlovic, the latter portraying a...

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...

Leaving November 1

Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues | 113 mins | 2016
Loosely drawing upon his own life—his father had gifted him a pair of bird-watching binoculars as a child—Rodrigues conjures an ecstatic phantasmagoria about an avian peeper (erstwhile haute couture hunk Paul Hamy) who finds h...

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...

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, finds solace from an unf...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Adina Pintilie | 123 mins | 2018
A Golden Bear-winner at the Berlin Film Festival, Pintilie’s controversial debut is a documentary-fiction hybrid essay film that takes physical intimacy, inhibition, and desire as its central themes, combining nonfiction interviews ...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 113 mins | 2010
Winner of the 2010 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film follows its fatally ill title character (Thanapat Saisaymar) on a final pilgrimage of sorts, traveling the countryside of Thailand’s rural northeas...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Sebastian Schipper | 138 mins | 2015
Eschewing the digitally composited “single take” of "Birdman" for the real-deal, in-camera approach seen in "Russian Ark," this electric German thriller follows the titular Victoria (Laia Costa), a young Spanish woman who stumbl...

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...