Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 61 mins | 2023
Do not adjust your set: the beguiling 29th film by Hong Sangsoo—who has distilled his art to the point of operating as virtually a one-man studio—was deliberately shot out of focus. This softly radical conceit mirrors the uncertainty of one of the central...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 83 mins | 2023
The second of two films put out by the prolific Hong in 2023, following "In Water", "In Our Day" is a lightfooted diptych that drifts into existential territory. The tale of a recently single actress, played by Hong’s longtime “muse” Kim Min-hee, who’s st...

Directed by Lou Ye | 126 mins | 2019
"Suzhou River" (2000) director Lou Ye sets this Hitchcockian espionage thriller in December of 1941, on the cusp of the Pearl Harbor attack. At its center, the inimitable Gong Li as a Chinese movie star who returns to Japanese-occupied Shanghai in order to app...

Directed by Catherine Breillat | 99 mins | 1999
When Marie’s (Caroline Ducey) boyfriend loses interest in having sex with her, she engages a series of new and increasingly violent lovers—in pursuit of self-knowledge and perhaps a kind of transcendence through these acts of erotic masochism. Renow...

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 Béla Tarr | 439 mins | 1994
A cinephile rite of passage, Tarr’s magnum opus immerses us in the world of about a dozen characters in a shuttered factory town who are visited by a messianic figure but are also distracted by their own eyebrow-raising personal missions. Creating a rich te...

Directed by Henry Jaglom | 110 mins | 1990
When a multigenerational group of women gather for a 40th birthday, their disordered relationships to food and to their own bodies bubble to the surface—going beyond just the plate of cake that gets endlessly passed between them to become an explicit top...

Directed by Henry Jaglom | 100 mins | 2001
A barbed backstage farce of entertainment industry wheeling and dealing, Jaglom’s film is set at the 1999 festival. Actress Alice (Greta Scacchi) is angling to get funding for an indie film, sweet talking and backstabbing alongside a colorful cast of ing...

Directed by Óliver Laxe | 86 mins | 2019
Filmed in and around Galicia’s Serra dos Ancares mountains, Laxe’s contemplative Un Certain Regard Jury Prize-winner "Fire Will Come" is the story of Amador (Amador Arias), a convicted firebug who has come home from prison to live with his mother, Benedict...

Directed by Henry Jaglom | 108 mins | 1995
Percolating existential crises, too-candid conversation, and, naturally, theatrics are in ample store when a family of stage actors and directors and playwrights assemble to bid farewell to their old summer house in this Cherry Orchard-tinted dramedy. As...

Directed by Nina Menkes | 90 mins | 1986
Menkes took home the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s “Best Independent Film” prize with her hypnotic but disturbing debut feature, in which her sister Tinka plays Ida, a sex worker accused of killing her pimp. Moving between a string of seedy, East ...

Directed by Henry Jaglom | 88 mins | 1990
Notable in part for a cameo by Miloš Forman and the in-the-buff appearance of a pre-fame David Duchovny, Jaglom’s shaggy, yearning-suffused chamber piece uses a real estate mix-up to throw together the freshly divorced Drew (played by the director himself...

Directed by Nina Menkes | 77 mins | 1991
Set in a drab, grimly coruscating Las Vegas, "Queen of Diamonds" again situates Tinka Menkes, the filmmaker’s sister, as an icon of womankind’s profound estrangement under patriarchy. Her character, Firdaus—the name borrowed from the unrepentant murderess ...

Directed by Henry Jaglom | 111 mins | 1987
This intimate meta-fiction, in which Jaglom plays a director who gathers a group of his single friends on Valentine’s Day so as to probe them for their views on love and loneliness, marks the final screen appearance of Orson Welles, a close friend of Jag...

Directed by Nina Menkes | 85 mins | 1996
Described by critics as her most radical work and by the filmmaker as her greatest, the fifth film Nina Menkes made with her sister Tinka in the lead—here, a Marine captain overseeing a murder investigation out in the Mojave—would also be their final colla...

Directed by Nina Menkes | 38 mins | 1983
Departing Jerusalem for unknown, arid landscapes, the unnamed protagonist—played by Nina Menkes’ sister, Tinka, in the first of their collaborations—also drifts away, as if compelled by unseen forces, from her orthodox Jewish community and faith. This femi...

Directed by Henry Jaglom | 92 mins | 1976
Dennis Hopper, in the depths of his decade-long exile from Hollywood, channels his livewire, damaged intensity into the role of Jack Falen, a soldier returned from Vietnam and on a mission to restore the body of his friend to his hometown by way of the Am...

Directed by Óliver Laxe | 78 mins | 2010
Born from a filmmaking workshop the director conducted with underprivileged children in Tangier, Laxe’s feature debut takes this real-life scenario as its premise but lights off into uncharted terrain when the pupils, rankling at his oblivious paternalism,...