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-Canadian director re...

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 war between rival d...

Directed by Jacques Audiard | 115 mins | 2015
Like his 2009 prison crime saga "A Prophet", Jacques Audiard’s Palme d’Or-winning pressure cooker "Dheepan" centers on a man thrown into a new, insular, and hostile society. Sivadhasan, a Tamil Tiger soldier—played by Antonythasan Jesuthasan, whose ow...

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 of the two girls...

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 with it. Revving m...

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 cultivating a relationsh...

Directed by Shirley Clarke | 107 mins | 1967
A distillation of a single 12-hour interview in a room at the Chelsea Hotel with the charismatic Jason Holliday (“real” name Aaron Payne), a gay, African American cabaret dancer, part-time hustler, and full-time raconteur, Portrait of Jason grows from ...

Directed by Ulrike Ottinger | 127 mins | 1981
An outrageous, carnivalesque camp reading of Virginia Woolf’s "Orlando", Ottinger’s crazed comedy follows its gender nonconforming hero/heroine through five wide-ranging adventures that span the history of the world: the Freak City department store, m...

Directed by Ulrike Ottiger | 108 mins | 1979
Ottinger’s collision of Hollywood flamboyancy and a particularly dour documentary aesthetic suits this Janus-faced tale of two female lushes from two very different walks of life, alike in many ways, but incapable of recognizing their bond. One is a kn...

Directed by Ulrike Ottinger | 150 mins | 1984
In Ottinger’s contemporary reinvention of the famous morality tale, fin-de-siècle dandy Dorian Gray is reimagined as a drag role, played without comment on the switch by Veruschka von Lehndorff in the male lead. Ottinger collides Oscar Wilde with Frit...

Directed by George A. Romero | 53 mins | 1975
The circumstances of this George A. Romero curio are as bizarre as the film itself. Commissioned as an educational video by a Lutheran organization, "The Amusement Park" screened just once at its 1975 premiere and, for over four decades, was considere...

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 best horror films e...

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 ‘70s American cine...

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 Canadian films eve...

Directed by Rodney Ascher | 103 mins | 2012
Among critics and fans, the films of Stanley Kubrick have inspired interpretations perhaps unique in both their range and florid intensity. (Alongside that of David Lynch, his career might offer the greatest argument for filmmakers saying very little ab...

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 Cooper) becomes c...

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 Nicolas Roeg). In ...

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 France and 1962 Haiti...

Directed by Alex Budovsky | 3 mins | 2003
This animation is based on Stephen Coates' composition under the same title and is about The Great Revolution of the British Cuckoos, who bravely took over London, forcing all the people to move inside the cuckoo clocks. This film was totally improvised, ...

Directed by Patrick Smith | 4 mins | 2020
"Beyond Noh" rhythmically animates 3,475 individual masks from all over the world, beginning with the distinctive masks of the Japanese Noh theater and continuing on a cultural journey through ritual, utility, deviance, and politics.

Directed by Peter Ahern | 5 mins | 2022
After hitting it off on a blind date, Rick and Becky decide they're ready to go steady. But as the night heats up, an unexpected discovery reveals first impressions can be deceiving.