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 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...

Leaving February 1

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...

Leaving February 1

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 c...

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 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 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...

Leaving February 1

Directed by Xuan Liang and Chun Zhang | 105 mins | 2016
“Spirited Away” meets “The Little Mermaid” in this gorgeously crafted fantasy blockbuster—a tale of shapeshifting, interspecies love and sacrifice sprung from ancient Chinese fables. The teenaged Chun—one of a mythical ra...

Leaving February 1

Directed by Jafar Panahi | 75 mins | 2011
Placed on house arrest by the Iranian government and forbidden from any further filmmaking activity for the following 20 years, Panahi used the slender resources at his command—his own apartment as a “set,” the aide of friends, includi...

Leaving February 1

Directed by Jafar Panahi | 100 mins | 2018
Panahi’s fourth post-filmmaking ban feature begins with a smartphone video of a young woman (Marziyeh Rezaei) who, forbidden by her parents to pursue her dream of acting professionally, appears to take her own life. The video is addre...

Leaving February 1

Directed by Rusty Cundieff | 88 mins | 1993
Overshadowed somewhat at the time of its release by another gangsta rap mockumentary send-up of the same year, the Chris Rock vehicle "CB4," Cundieff’s shoestring-budget feature debut gets just as many laughs at a fraction of the pri...

Leaving February 1

Directed by Werner Herzog | 94 mins | 1972
The first collaboration between Herzog and Klaus Kinski cast the notoriously unhinged actor as the even more unhinged 16th-century conquistador Don Lope de Aguirre—nicknamed “El Loco” or “The Madman”—found embarking on his final missi...

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 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 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...