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...

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, two years his senio...

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. When she lands a plum r...

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 War. When a stranger—...

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 happened. A sublime swan s...

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 h...

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 evidences...

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" begi...

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 menta...

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 t...