Directed by Jessica Hausner | 77 mins | 2004
Jessica Hausner’s eerily enigmatic second feature is suffused with the crystalline chill of its remote alpine setting. It follows Irene, newly employed as a receptionist at Waldhaus, a stately hotel in the woods: The young woman is unsettled to learn t...

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 Harry Kümel | 87 mins | 1971
Profoundly inspired by the spirit of Belgian Surrealist and Symbolist painting, Kümel’s darkly poetic horror film begins with a young newlywed couple waylaid at a grand hotel en route to England, where they fall under the spell of the elegant Hungarian Cou...

Directed by Dario Argento | 119 mins | 1996
Asia Argento, the director’s daughter and a future star in her own right, plays a detective on the trail of a serial killer, who takes advantage of her condition: entering an unconscious or fugue state upon encountering certain artwork. Infusing giallo ...

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 Dario Argento | 106 mins | 1980
Showing Argento’s doubling down on visual logic of dreams, this mystical yarn of alchemy and witchcraft unfolds as a series of lurid setpieces and cryptic clue-drops, largely in a New York apartment building. Resisting explication, the story erupts with...

Directed by Jérémy Clapin | 89 mins | 2024
Aspiring graphic novelist Elsa (an arresting Megan Northam) is struggling with the disappearance of her astronaut brother Franck, who vanished during his first mission. While stargazing one night, she is shocked to receive contact from him, but her joy i...

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 Mickey Keating | 70 mins | 2024
Clocking in at a taut 70 minutes, horror maverick Mickey Keating’s ("Darling", 2015) home invasion story is lean, mean, and brutally immersive. Ana (Vero Maynez) travels by bus to the suburb outside of Chicago where her cousin Camila lives, arriving lat...

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 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 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 Alex Thompson | 90 mins | 2022
A hospital is a place where science reigns over religion—but maybe not in the rural town of Greenville, where medical student James (Namir Smallwood) has just been transferred, intending to finish his residency while still recovering from a breakdown at ...

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 Marisa Crespo and Moisés Romera | 99 mins | 2023
The holiday period can be an alienating one, especially if you’re queer, and/or if a surprise visit to your family home yields the unsettling discovery that a stranger is sleeping in your old room, wearing your clothes, and being doted ...

Directed by Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes | 90 mins | 2013
Soylent Green is people and, sometimes, so is the fertilizer purveyed by brothers Reg and Lindsay Morgan (Damon Herriman and Angus Sampson) in this pungent Aussie horror-comedy, the directorial debut of Cameron and Colin Cairnes ("Lat...

Directed by Sonia Kennebeck | 93 mins | 2023
Between being played by Sydney Sweeney (in "Reality", 2023) and Emilia Jones (in "Winner", 2024), the Air Force veteran and NSA translator-turned-whistleblower finally plays herself in this remarkable documentary by Sonia Kennebeck, executive produced ...

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...