Directed by Claire Denis | 100 mins | 2008
“It’s the best father-daughter movie I can think of. And it’s one of the greatest romances, too… The dance sequence to 'Night Shift' by the Commodores is not able to be described. We are witness to the most magical thing that can happen between two peopl...

Directed by Stanley Kwan | 154 mins | 1991
One of the brightest stars of the Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema pays tribute to a predecessor from pre-revolutionary Chinese cinema, as Maggie Cheung passionately embodies Ruan Lingyu (1910-1935), the silent screen icon who committed suicide when hounde...

Directed by Lynne Ramsay | 98 mins | 2002
A sensory odyssey packed into an intimate story of love, death, and theft, Lynne Ramsay’s second feature stays close to its impossibly distant title character, played with a transfixing inscrutability by Samantha Morton. Passing off the work of her suicid...

Directed by Claire Denis | 95 mins | 2017
Claire Denis’s voluptuous riff on "A Lover’s Discourse" by Roland Barthes stars a characteristically radiant Juliette Binoche as Isabelle, a divorced artist in search of swoon-inducing, capital-L love. What she finds, via a series of comedy-laced liaisons...

Directed by Peter Greenaway | 126 mins | 1995
Made from animal skins, parchment has been used as a medium for language since ancient times; in Peter Greenaway’s sumptuous, Hong Kong–set fabulation, the human body is the preferred site of expression, and the act of inscription an erotic rite. Vivi...

Directed by Claire Denis | 130 mins | 2004
One of Claire Denis’s most ambitious, complicated, and exhilaratingly daring films charts an itinerary traveling from the snowy Alps to Korea to Tahiti, following an old mercenary (Michel Subor, from "Le Petit Soldat" and "Beau Travail") in search of bot...

Leaving December 1

Directed by John Dahl | 110 mins | 1994
Skipping town on her husband Clay (Bill Pullman), Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) sets about seducing a series of men into abetting her lethal money-making schemes. The fact that this erotic thriller played initially on TV meant that ...

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 118 mins | 1994
Tsai’s second feature is a masterful evocation of urban loneliness and longing, quietly devastating even in its forays into something like slowed-down slapstick. A love triangle takes shape when three people—including a repressed funerary salesman pla...

Directed by Kore-eda Hirokazu | 116 mins | 2009
A Tokyo waiter’s sex doll (Korean star Bae Doona) comes to life in this bittersweet modern fairy tale from the director of "Shoplifters" and "Nobody Knows." Her wide-eyed wanderings bring out the loneliness of the metropolis—shot by Hou Hsiao-hsien’...

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 (F...

Directed by Géza von Radványi | 91 mins | 1958
Leaving aside the portrayals of royals that had been her breakthrough, Romy Schneider ventured into more risqué territory with this story of Sapphic desire bubbling up in a Potsdam boarding school—the second silver screen adaptation of Christa Winslo...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Terence Davies | 92 mins | 1995
Based on John Kennedy Toole’s Southern Gothic Bildungsroman, Terence Davies’ third feature is both his first adaptation and his first set outside England, but feels just as steeped in heady memory as his earlier works. His vision of ...

Leaving December 1

Directed by Alan Rudolph | 111 mins | 1985
Alan Rudolph’s underseen noir oddity soaks in the grimy ambiance of Rain City, where Hawk (Kris Kristofferson)—a former cop, more recently a convict—is readjusting to the straight world and struggling young father Coop (Keith Carradin...

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...