Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 111 mins | 2024
In his 32nd feature, one of modern cinema's great artists achieves new modes of expression. Hong Sangsoo's "By the Stream" continues a career-long trend of making it look easy and achieving a-ha effects that never seemed possible, all couched in a seemin...

Directed by Éric Rohmer | 103 mins | 1987
Rohmer uses the amorous misadventures of two girlfriends in the Paris suburbs to test the old proverb “les amis de mes amis sont mes amis” (“the friends of my friends are my friends”) in the final episode of his “Comedies and Proverbs” series. Taking an ...

Directed by Maren Ade | 123 mins | 2009
Years before the crossover success of "Toni Erdmann", Maren Ade established herself as an uncommonly intelligent and bracingly honest voice in modern cinema with "Everyone Else", which earned the Berlin Film Festival's Silver Bear prize. Her second film beg...

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 89 mins | 1999
It’s the close of the millennium and Taipei has emptied out with the onset of a mysterious virus, but Lee Kang-sheng and Yang Kuei-mei lag behind among the ruins, where maybe a last chance at communication lies through a breach between their apartments...

Directed by Tsui Hark | 103 mins | 1984
This kinetic, ultra-stylish screwball comedy/historical romance/backstage musical by the inimitable Tsui—beautifully restored for its 40th anniversary—is one of the most zestily entertaining works of 1980s Hong Kong cinema. Kenny Bee’s nightclub clown and w...

Directed by Sandhya Suri | 120 mins | 2024
Trained to take the place of her police constable husband who was killed on the job, young housewife Santosh (Shahana Goswami) is dropped into the harsh realities of rural Northern India and paired with a savvy, charismatic inspector, Sharma (Sunita Rajw...

Directed by Henry Jaglom | 90 mins | 1983
The fleet, dryly funny fourth feature from independent cinema stalwart Henry Jaglom stars a riveting Karen Black—who also composed music for the film—as Zee, a middle-aged Upper West Sider, who, reeling after being abandoned by her husband, pursues an am...

Directed by Jun Ichikawa | 76 mins | 2004
Jun Ichikawa is one of Japan’s least-appraised geniuses, and "Tony Takitani" is perhaps his masterpiece. This Haruki Murakami adaptation mirrors the author’s clear, precise prose with its study of a well-meaning loner, played perfectly by Issey Ogata ("Yi...

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa | 115 mins | 2002
Kurosawa's disquieting slow-burn focuses on Mamoru (Tadanobu Asano), a young, divorced father and employee at a hand towel factory who, with his co-worker and only friend, Nimura (Joe Odagiri), begins entertaining homicidal thoughts about their boss ...

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa | 120 mins | 2019
This rare film made outside Kurosawa's native Japan is also some of the closest he's come to outright comedy. When TV host Yoko (J-pop sensation Atsuko Maeda) travels to Uzbekistan to record a new episode of her travel show, the country's unfamiliar ...

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa | 134 mins | 2016
It's a classic Kurosawa set-up: forced to retire after a hostage situation goes violently astray, a detective retires to the suburbs with his wife, only to find investigative instincts piqued by a young girl whose family mysteriously vanished. Things...

Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien | 107 mins | 2001
A seductive submersion into the techno-scored neon nightlife of Taipei, Hou’s much-misunderstood marvel follows an aimless bar hostess drifting away from her blowhard boyfriend and towards a suave, sensitive gangster. A transfixing trance-out of a mo...

Directed by Lea Glob | 116 mins | 2022
With her intense gaze and assured manner, the artist who gives Lea Glob’s documentary its title, a French painter born into the Parisian counterculture, is a figure of considerable magnetism. Filmed over the course of 13 years, from Apolonia’s early twentie...

Directed by Emily Atef | 129 mins | 2023
The golden hot summer after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 provides the backdrop for Emily Atef’s fraught and steamy May-December romance, adapted from a 2011 novel by Daniela Krien. On a farm in former East Germany, 19-year-old Maria drifts apart fro...

Directed by Philippe Lesage | 118 mins | 2015
Philippe Lesage’s fifth feature also marks his narrative debut, begetting an uncommon blend of atmosphere and storytelling. When a group of young boys are kidnapped in his suburban Montreal town, Felix, a fear-riddled 10-year-old, finds his wild imagi...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 127 mins | 2006
Deploying another of Hong’s beguiling twice-told narratives, Woman on the Beach begins with the tale of a creatively blocked filmmaker and his affair with the girlfriend of his friend and sometime collaborator at a coastal resort, then follows the filmm...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 115 mins | 2010
Two friends in a bar trade stories about their romantic exploits at a beach, which we come to realize involve the same people (including a restaurant owner played by Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung). Through adroit layering, Hong brings a wry sympathy to the ...

Directed by Laura Bispuri | 88 mins | 2015
This adaptation of Elvira Dones’s acclaimed novel fully mines the psychological dimensions of the “sworn virgin”—Albanian women who follow an obscure law whereby, upon taking a vow of virginity, they may escape imposed domestic life and live as a man. Ma...

Directed by Raúl Ruiz | 267 mins | 2010
It is a rare thing for one of a filmmaker’s final works to rank among their greatest, and their most classically sumptuous—but such is the case with Ruiz’s sweeping, four-and-a-half-hour-long adaptation of Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco’s novel of...

Directed by Philippe Lesage | 155 mins | 2024
Secluded getaways rarely go well in cinema, and the incredible concision of "Who by Fire" allows one to quickly surmise unease. Just how it does so, in its altogether surprising cohesion of character and incident, further proves Philippe Lesage a maj...