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 India Donaldson | 90 mins | 2024
A standout of Sundance 2024, Donaldson’s piercing debut drama stars astonishing newcomer Lily Collias as 17-year-old Sam, forced to play mediator between her father (James Le Gros) and his oldest friend (Danny McCarthy) when their gently contentious ba...

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 Zhang Lu | 144 mins | 2023
Rich in gently rhyming motifs, Zhang Lu’s 2023 Berlinale competition offering orbits a food and restaurant critic in Beijing. Middle-aged and listless in the aftermath of a divorce, Gu Wentong finds himself contemplating a reunion with the father he hasn’t s...

Directed by Emin Alper | 131 mins | 2022
The long shadow of Polanski’s "Chinatown" (1974) looms over this stylish, sun-bleached noir about corruption in a backwoods Turkish province, hailed as a standout of the Un Certain Regard program at Cannes in 2022. Newly posted to this far-flung community,...

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 Shunji Iwai | 146 mins | 2001
Incredibly prescient in its understanding of how a still-young internet would fundamentally alter youth culture, Shunji’s film introduces Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) in an ice field, the landscape gradually obscured by accreting chat room messages. Alienated...

Directed by Andrzej Zulawski | 124 mins | 1981
Banned upon its original release in 1981, Andrzej Żuławski’s stunningly choreographed nightmare of a marriage unraveling is an experience unlike any other. Professional spy Mark (Sam Neill) returns to his West Berlin home to find his wife Anna (Isab...

Directed by Emily Atef | 123 mins | 2022
Starring a luminous Vicky Krieps and Gaspard Ulliel in one of his final screen appearances, the heartrending "More Than Ever" relates a life, and a marriage, rerouted by the diagnosis of a rare lung disease. Though Hélène loves her husband Mathieu dearly, ...

Directed by Augusto Sandino | 77 mins | 2021
For Colombia’s Indigenous Muisca people, Sumapaz Páramo, a tropical plateau located high up in the Andes, was a sacred realm. It is here that Augusto Sandino sets his haunting, mystical debut—the first film to have ever been shot in this now-endangered...

Directed by Ben Rivers | 19 mins | 2008
"Ah, Liberty!" is rooted in Rivers’s own childhood memories of the derelict buildings that served as a playground for him and his friends. This freedom, which feels feral and unstable, is captured here in grainy, hand-processed 16mm black and white, playing...

Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve | 98 mins | 2007
Mia Hansen-Løve was only twenty-five when she directed one of the most striking and auspicious first features in 21st century French cinema, which finds the brisk economy of expression, nuanced characterization, and formal daring of her future films (...

Directed by Tomás Gómez Bustillo | 84 mins | 2023
Can you scam your way into sainthood? This question underpins the first section of Tomás Gómez Bustillo’s wry but warming debut feature, wherein Rita, a devout Catholic with a competitive streak, contrives to convince the residents of her Argentin...

Directed by Fruit Chan | 109 mins | 1997
The first independent film released in post-Handover Hong Kong, Chan’s atmospheric shoestring-budget character study is a rough-and-ready piece of work shot on grainy leftover 35mm short ends in the city’s overcrowded subsidized housing projects. The resu...

Directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili | 134 mins | 2024
Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Venice, Kulumbegashvili’s follow-up to her acclaimed debut feature "Beginning" is anchored by Ia Sukhitashvili’s powerhouse performance as Nina, an obstetrician in rural Georgia whose history of discreetly provi...

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 Éric Rohmer | 106 mins | 1981
The inaugural film of Éric Rohmer’s “Comedies and Proverbs” cycle, The Aviator’s Wife is a fleecy farce of romantic overanalysis that finds the director exploring the possibilities of handheld camerawork in following a narrative expression of the opening...

Directed by Lee Chang-dong | 130 mins | 1999
Opening on a shocking scene of implied suicide, Lee’s sophomore feature proceeds to move backward in time, its reverse chronology following its protagonist’s unhappiness to its source, following him from the end of the ’70s to the close of the ’90s—yea...

Directed by Ben Rivers | 46 mins | 2019
An elliptical travelogue buoyed by the poetry of W.S. Merwin. Fernando Pessoa, and Muriel Rukeyser, "Ghost Strata" is divided into 12 sections, one for each month of the year over which it was shot. As he roves, Rivers trains his camera on piquant details, ...

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 82 mins | 2003
Like the Royal Theater in The Last Picture Show and the title movie house in Cinema Paradiso, the Fu-Ho is shutting down for good. A palace with seemingly mile-wide rows of red velvet seats, the likes of which you’ve seen only in your most nostalgic d...