Directed by Danielle Arbid | 99 mins | 2020
To make an adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s 1992 auto fictional novel of the same name—exploring the author’s year-long obsession with a younger Russian diplomat—that is as bold and bracing as the source material is no mean feat. Putin-loving Ukranian balle...

Directed by Werner Herzog | 108 mins | 1977
Herzog’s longstanding fascination with cannibal killer Ed Gein drew him to shoot his devastating film of American dreams deferred in wild, wonderful Wisconsin, where a West Berlin street musician, Stroszek—played by Bruno S., the oft-institutionalized b...

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 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 an aging cargo train ...

Directed by Werner Herzog | 110 mins | 1974
After spotting self-taught outsider artist Bruno S. in a documentary about street musicians, Herzog was determined to work with him, and proceeded to cast this troubled man with zero acting experience who’d been raised in mental institutions as the lead...

Directed by Pierre Desir | 18 mins | 2001
A five-film shorts program curated by LA Rebellion affiliated-filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis, including works by Pierre Desir ("The Gods and the Thief"), Julie Dash ("Four Women"), Portia Cobb ("Don’t Hurry Back: A Diaspora Fable"), and others.

“These sh...

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 Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky | 155 mins | 2011
Tarr’s final feature distills the essence of his cinema with the potency of farmer’s moonshine: a cart driver and his daughter survive harsh lives amid the stark beauty of desolation. With a nearly mood-altering dilation of time, this pr...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 77 mins | 2020
Hong mines wisdom and wit out of a deftly presented and deceptively simple scenario: a young woman’s visits to three of her friends while her husband’s away. In insightful, unpredictable conversations with people at different points in their lives, Gamhee...

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 with a narrative cen...

Directed by Christian Petzold | 101 mins | 2018
The first fraught and steamy pairing of Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski by acclaimed writer-director Christian Petzold—followed by 2020’s "Undine"—proved one of the best films of 2018, and a breakthrough for the beguiling Rogowski. Building on themes ...

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 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 northeast where he encounter...

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 stumbles out of an early-h...

Directed by Werner Herzog | 80 mins | 1979
An unfinished but influential play by the terribly short lived 19th century author Georg Büchner provides the basis for this tale of a soldier—played by vitriolic diva Klaus Kinski—driven to psychological ruin by an errant lover and a diet of only peas. ...

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...

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 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...

Directed by Hong Khaou | 86 mins | 2014
Subtle but charged performances from both Ben Whishaw and Hong Kong icon Cheng Pei-Pei ("Come Drink with Me") anchor Hong Khaou’s haunting directorial debut, in which the death of a young, gay, Cambodian-Chinese man brings together his grieving mother and t...