Leaving April 1

Directed by Paul Morrissey | 99 mins | 1984
Brazilian diva Marília Pêra, fresh from her international breakthrough in Héctor Babenco’s "Pixote," is the queenly matriarch of a dope-dealing dynasty in Morrissey’s marvelous, grimly funny Alphabet City melodrama, concerning a turf wa...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Nicolás Pereda | 76 mins | 2024
Three actors compete for a role in the same low-budget movie and for each other’s amorous attentions in this low-key but formally playful existentialist comedy by Nicolás Pereda. Deftly blending fact, fiction, and fable, the Mexican-Can...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 122 mins | 2015
Weaving together Thailand’s rich fundament of supernatural mythology and its often troubled national history, Apichatpong crafts a bewitching and seductive cinematic idyll, in which comatose soldiers suffering from a mysteri...

Leaving April 1

Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues | 87 mins | 2000
The rare film to be both feted by festival cognoscenti and uploaded to disreputable porn sites, Rodrigues’s confrontational, controversial debut feature heralded the arrival of a major queer artist. Concerning the carnal odyssey o...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Bob Clark | 98 mins | 1974
Disturbing phone calls and a lethally minded intruder drain the cheer from a sorority Christmas party in this seminal Canadian slasher—a lodestar for “Halloween” (1978) and indeed the entire subgenre. Now widely acknowledged as one of the be...

Leaving April 1

Directed by David Cronenberg | 91 mins | 1977
Like the mutant stinger that sprouts from Marilyn Chambers’ armpit, David Cronenberg burst onto the scene with the one-two punch of “Shivers” (1975) and “Rabid.” In his second feature—which rapidly became one of the highest-grossing C...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Donald Cammell | 110 mins | 1987
In a directorial career marred by thwarted ambitions and cut short by his suicide at age 62, Donald Cammell nonetheless showed great flare for woozy, sinister surrealism, beginning with his 1970 debut, “Performance” (co-directed with N...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Philip Ridley | 96 mins | 1990
A word-of-mouth sensation at Cannes, Philip Ridley’s debut feature is a macabre, magic hour-tinted work of Prairie Gothic—a Lynchian riff on “Days of Heaven,” spiked with intimations of the supernatural. Eight-year-old Seth Dove (Jeremy ...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Bertrand Bonello | 103 mins | 2019
“Listen up, white world / To my zombi roar”—René Depestre’s poem “Cap’tain Zombi” reverberates through this heady brew of a Voodou flick by the justly celebrated French auteur Bertrand Bonello (“Nocturama”). Moving between 2010s Fran...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Bill Gunn | 113 mins | 1973
Cut by timid distributors and inappropriately marketed as grindhouse blaxploitation, this eerie, sui generis work by utterly iconoclastic director Bill Gunn ("Personal Problems") is, in its original form, nothing short of a masterpiece of ‘...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski | 104 mins | 2022
High school teacher Rachel (Virginie Efira) falls in love with Ali, and then with his 4-year-old, Leila— strengthening her desire to have a child of her own. But at 40, she knows that biology is working against her, and that cultiva...

Leaving April 1

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 w...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Kōji Fukada | 111 mins | 2019
As the carer for the elderly Toko, home nurse Ichiko is practically a member of the family, favored especially by the bedridden woman’s granddaughters. But Ichiko’s life—and identity—come unspooled after the abduction of Saki, the younger...