Leaving October 1

Directed by Lina Wertmüller | 105 mins | 1974
Wertmüller’s wild, woolly working-class satire of the fantasy of upward mobility focuses on a cadre of Sicilian migrants living in a Milan commune as they struggle to make ends meet as kitchen employees while simultaneously avoiding...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Billy Woodberry | 89 mins | 2015
Assembled from archival footage, new interviews, and readings from such figures as Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, this high-spirited screen portrait of the late African American Beat poet and bon vivant Bob Kaufman is given an appropriate...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi | 119 mins | 2018
Between the international breakthrough of 2015’s "Happy Hour" and the sensation that was 2021’s "Drive My Car," Hamaguchi produced this beguiling romance, concerning a young woman and her affairs with, first, a self-dramatizing yo...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Derek Jarman | 79 mins | 1993
Over an unceasing, monochromatic blue frame, voices read a poetic text in which Jarman muses on his physical and mental deterioration as well as the endless implications of the color blue. Jarman, dying of AIDS, would be gone within a y...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor | 90 mins | 2017
Following the epic sweep of Leviathan, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor produced this work of smothering, terrible intimacy, an ice-cold, unsettling study in strange sibling rivalry and disturbing domestic arrang...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Derek Jarman | 93 mins | 1986
A brazenly anachronistic and sensual imagining of the life of Renaissance renegade Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Nigel Terry), seen juggling two lovers (Sean Bean’s Ranuccio and Tilda Swinton’s Lena) while scandalizing the establis...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Luchino Visconti | 121 mins | 1974
The solitary existence of an aging art historian (Burt Lancaster) is interrupted when the top floor of his Roman palazzo is invaded by a vulgar marchesa and her entourage, including young gigolo Helmut Berger.

Leaving October 1

Directed by Travis Wilkerson | 90 mins | 2017
A particularly lacerating take on the “home movie,” Wilkerson’s film excavates the buried story of his own great-grandfather’s murder of a Black man in c. 1946 Dothan, Alabama, an inquest that puts him in conflict with contemporary ...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Atom Egoyan | 105 mins | 2020
Adeptly handling a knotty narrative that shifts between past and present, Egoyan is in fine fettle in this character-based work centered on Veronica, a high school teacher imprisoned for a crime she didn’t commit, and her father (a supe...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Ursula Meier | 98 mins | 2009
Isabelle Huppert gives a nuanced and fascinatingly opaque performance in Meier’s tragicomic tale of a fracturing family, with La Huppert starring as the uncompromising, iconoclastic matriarch of a clan that’s forsaken society to lead an...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Michelangelo Frammartino | 93 mins | 2012
In rugged Calabria, Italian speleologists explore the depths of the Bifurto Abyss, Europe’s deepest cave, reaching 700 meters below the Earth’s surface—their excavations drawing the attention of a shepherd on the nearby Poll...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Bertrand Bonello | 95 mins | 2012
Bonello’s cinematic salute to the enduringly enigmatic presence of R.W. Fassbinder muse Caven focuses on her career as celebrated avant-garde chanteuse, documenting one of her infamous cabaret-style shows combining popular standards...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Robert Greene | 112 mins | 2016
Greene’s rug-pulling docufiction—luminously shot by DP Sean Price Williams—follows actress Kate Lyn Sheil through her increasingly obsessive and mentally deleterious preparations to take on the role of Christine Chubbuck, a Florida ne...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Mariano Llinás | 226 mins | 2018
An epic mosaic that serves as a paean to the pleasures of narrative, wrought in three parts, six episodes, and 14 ½ hours, Llinás’s La Flor is a simultaneously gargantuan and winningly humble shapeshifter film, with each of its secti...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Mariano Llinás | 344 mins | 2018
An epic mosaic that serves as a paean to the pleasures of narrative, wrought in three parts, six episodes, and 14 ½ hours, Llinás’s La Flor is a simultaneously gargantuan and winningly humble shapeshifter film, with each of its secti...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Mariano Llinás | 323 mins | 2018
An epic mosaic that serves as a paean to the pleasures of narrative, wrought in three parts, six episodes, and 14 ½ hours, Llinás’s La Flor is a simultaneously gargantuan and winningly humble shapeshifter film, with each of its secti...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Antonio Méndez Esparza | 114 mins | 2017
Spanish-born Esparza’s acclaimed sophomore feature is a delicately drawn, urgently emotional neorealist depiction of contemporary life lived at the precipice of despair, concerning a struggling single mother (Regina Williams)...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Bi Gan | 140 mins | 2019
Beginning as a kind of atmospheric, neon-drenched film noir fever dream, Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night follows Huang Jue as he returns to his hometown of Kaili for his father’s funeral, then sets off on the trail of an old flame (T...