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 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 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 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. Creating a rich te...

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...

Leaving March 1

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, o...

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 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 take...

Leaving March 1

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...

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 d...

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 n...

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 wre...

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 a...

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. Har...

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-professional...