Leaving January 1

Directed by Robert Lee King | 96 mins | 2000
The wholesome genre of 1950s beach movies gets a demented camp makeover in the parodic, perky-paletted story of Chicklet (Lauren Ambrose), a teenager who becomes a suspect in a serial killer investigation because of her multiple pers...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Jia Zhangke | 130 mins | 2013
Jia’s jarringly to-the-moment wuxia film, based on scandalous stories from around Mainland China circulated via Weibo posts, focuses on four individuals in four provinces pushed towards violence by rampant injustice—including one who re...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Jia Zhangke | 126 mins | 2015
A simple love triangle between three young people living in Fenyang—Jia’s much-revisited and filmed hometown—lays the foundations for an epoch-spanning triptych, describing the past, present, and future of three characters (including le...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Ramon Zürcher and Silvan Zürcher | 98 mins | 2021
An apartment move-out produces an exquisite ballet of curious personal dramas and fraught relationships (new and old) thanks to the whisker-sensitive filmmaking of the Zürcher brothers. Set amid nosy neighbors, it’s ...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Manoel de Oliveira | 97 mins | 2010
When a photographer is asked by a grieving family to shoot a funeral portrait of their deceased daughter, she miraculously appears to come alive. So begins a typically enchanting and richly detailed ghost story from Oliveira—one o...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Argyris Papadimitropoulos | 100 mins | 2016
A frumpy doctor on a sun-kissed Greek isle falls for a nubile young beachgoer whom he treats, then descends down the rabbit hole of his seemingly hopeless crush. An unpredictable tragicomic look at the demands and disaster...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Morris Engel | 81 mins | 1953
A pioneering influence on the French New Wave, this New York independent classic follows a seven-year-old boy through the hustle and bustle of Coney Island after he runs away from home, spooked by a cruel prank. It’s filmed with close-u...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Karim Aïnouz | 107 mins | 2014
In this reflective romance from Brazilian auteur Aïnouz, a lifeguard (Wagner Moura) throws himself into a torrid affair with a motorcycling war veteran whose friend disappears in the ocean, but then struggles to find himself after trav...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Manoel de Oliveira | 63 mins | 2009
In Oliveira’s rueful romantic tale, an accountant grows obsessed with a formidable young woman he spots in a window across the street, and tries to court her despite his uncle’s snobby disapproval. Ricardo Trepa, who was both Oliv...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Curtis Harrington | 86 mins | 1961
After time in the early experimental film scene in LA and Hollywood studio lots, Harrington made his narrative feature debut with the gloomy, atmospheric "Night Tide", a loose reworking of Tourneur’s "Cat People" featuring a young ...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Manoel de Oliveira | 95 mins | 2012
Oliveira’s triumphant swansong turns a family dinner into a percolating drama of mortality and morality as a bookkeeper and his wife reckon with their estranged son’s thievery. The cast is a roster of arthouse legends: Michael Lon...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Angela Schanelec | 95 mins | 2019
One of European art cinema’s most distinctive voices, Schanelec—Silver Bear winner for Best Director at this year's Berlinale—orchestrates a tense elliptical drama that’s part psychological close-up, part middle-class Berlin pastich...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Jeff Malmberg | 82 mins | 2010
In Malmberg’s mesmerizing, multi-award-winning portrait of healing and obsession, Mark Hogencamp recovers from a brutal assault and alcoholism by building and tending to a miniature plywood town in his backyard. Populating the diorama ...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Alice Diop | 97 mins | 2016
At the end of one of the corridors of the Avicennes Hospital in Bobigny, just outside of Paris, is a medical clinic for refugees: one of just a few in France, and the no-frills setting of this bracing piece of direct cinema. The dispassio...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Alice Diop | 40 mins | 2016
Four young men from the Parisian banlieues discourse on sex and love in this up-close and confessional, César-winning exploration of the contemporary male gaze. As in "Danton’s Death" (2011), the filmmaker Alice Diop is present in the fil...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Alice Diop | 65 mins | 2011
Skillfully illustrating the persistence of racialized stereotyping and its impact on the individual, Diop’s documentary follows the professional struggles of a young Black actor from Aulnay-sous-bois, a disadvantaged community on the outs...