Directed by Béla Tarr | 439 mins | 1994
A cinephile rite of passage, Tarr’s magnum opus immerses us in the world of about a dozen characters in a shuttered factory town who are visited by a messianic figure but are also distracted by their own eyebrow-raising personal missions. Creating a rich te...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 61 mins | 2023
Do not adjust your set: the beguiling 29th film by Hong Sangsoo—who has distilled his art to the point of operating as virtually a one-man studio—was deliberately shot out of focus. This softly radical conceit mirrors the uncertainty of one of the central...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 83 mins | 2023
The second of two films put out by the prolific Hong in 2023, following "In Water", "In Our Day" is a lightfooted diptych that drifts into existential territory. The tale of a recently single actress, played by Hong’s longtime “muse” Kim Min-hee, who’s st...

Directed by Lou Ye | 126 mins | 2019
"Suzhou River" (2000) director Lou Ye sets this Hitchcockian espionage thriller in December of 1941, on the cusp of the Pearl Harbor attack. At its center, the inimitable Gong Li as a Chinese movie star who returns to Japanese-occupied Shanghai in order to app...

Directed by Edo Bertoglio | 72 mins | 2000
In 1980, writer and Warhol associate Glenn O’Brien, Swiss photographer Edo Bertoglio, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, a graffiti innovator and noise music artist who’d just begun to exhibit his paintings, hit the streets of lower Manhattan to make a movie abou...

Directed by Catherine Breillat | 99 mins | 1999
When Marie’s (Caroline Ducey) boyfriend loses interest in having sex with her, she engages a series of new and increasingly violent lovers—in pursuit of self-knowledge and perhaps a kind of transcendence through these acts of erotic masochism. Renow...

Directed by Óliver Laxe | 86 mins | 2019
Filmed in and around Galicia’s Serra dos Ancares mountains, Laxe’s contemplative Un Certain Regard Jury Prize-winner "Fire Will Come" is the story of Amador (Amador Arias), a convicted firebug who has come home from prison to live with his mother, Benedict...

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 mov...

Directed by Roberto Minervini | 88 mins | 2024
Roberto Minervini followed his staggering Deep South missive "What You Gonna Do When the World’s On Fire?" (2018) with this heady time capsule from the American Civil War’s Western front, for which he took home Un Certain Regard’s Best Director prize...

Directed by Henry Jaglom | 88 mins | 1990
Notable in part for a cameo by Miloš Forman and the in-the-buff appearance of a pre-fame David Duchovny, Jaglom’s shaggy, yearning-suffused chamber piece uses a real estate mix-up to throw together the freshly divorced Drew (played by the director himself...

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 Oliver Laxe | 96 mins | 2016
Laxe’s gorgeously composed film, winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes, follows a caravan transporting a dying sheikh to the village of his birth in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains—a journey his corpse will complete in the company of two strangers. A...

Directed by Nina Menkes | 77 mins | 1991
Set in a drab, grimly coruscating Las Vegas, "Queen of Diamonds" again situates Tinka Menkes, the filmmaker’s sister, as an icon of womankind’s profound estrangement under patriarchy. Her character, Firdaus—the name borrowed from the unrepentant murderess ...

Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 122 mins | 2015
Weaving together Thailand’s rich fundament of supernatural mythology and its often troubled national history, Apichatpong crafts a bewitching and seductive cinematic idyll, in which comatose soldiers suffering from a mysterious sleeping sick...

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 (Isabe...

Directed by Óliver Laxe | 78 mins | 2010
Born from a filmmaking workshop the director conducted with underprivileged children in Tangier, Laxe’s feature debut takes this real-life scenario as its premise but lights off into uncharted terrain when the pupils, rankling at his oblivious paternalism,...

Directed by Shinji Sômai | 115 mins | 1985
Emotionally raw, enormously tender and, finally, tentatively hopeful, Sômai’s breakthrough film—winner of the Grand Prix at the first Tokyo International Film Festival—observes a group of provincial junior high students who find themselves forced to take...