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 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 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 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 Jack Hazan | 106 mins | 1973
Jack Hazan’s intimate and innovative film about English-born, often California-based artist David Hockney and his work honors its subject through creative risk-taking. The improvisatory narrative-nonfiction hybrid features Hockney—a wary participant—as we...

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 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 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 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 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, ...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Gregg Araki | 79 mins | 1993
The first film of Araki’s “Teenage Apocalypse” trilogy, which the director once described as a “cross between avant-garde experimental cinema and a queer John Hughes flick,” "Totally F***ed Up" focuses on six gay adolescents who, reje...

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...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Bette Gordon | 100 mins | 1983
A young woman lands a job as a cashier at a downtown porno theater, and soon finds herself inexorably drawn towards what’s happening onscreen—as well as other troubling fantasies. One of the great independent films of the ’80s, featurin...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Amos Poe | 70 mins | 1976
Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character in "Breathless" (1960) thought he was Humphrey Bogart; Duncan Hannah’s character in this proto-No Wave work—a restless poseur slash photographer named Rico—thinks he’s Jean-Paul Belmondo. Released the same year...

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, ...