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 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 the Quay Brothers | 101 mins | 2004
“Absolutely entrancing!!!” Guy Maddin closed his "Film Comment" review of the Quay Brothers’s second feature with a tripled exclamation—a testament to the rare and painstaking artistry they bring to their signature blend of stop-motion and live act...

Directed by Wei Shujun | 102 mins | 2023
After a woman’s body is discovered on a river bank in rural southern China, police investigator Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) finds that it’s only the first layer of a deepening mystery, bound up in the hidden life of the nearby community. Based on Yu Hua’s short n...

Directed by Ang Lee | 105 mins | 1991
Tensions brew and language becomes a barrier when widowed tai chi master Mr. Chu (Lung Sihung) swaps Beijing for a new life in New York City, where he joins the household of his Americanized son and white daughter-in-law. Ang Lee’s directorial debut evidence...

Directed by Jafar Panahi | 97 mins | 2003
This early film by the Iranian master—a thriller in reverse, opening with the climactic jewelry store heist before flashing back to its inciting events—is lesser-known but among his best. In the central role, Hossein Emadeddin: like his character, a ment...

Directed by Jafar Panahi | 91 mins | 2000
Interweaving the travails of a handful of women in Tehran who, over the course of a single day, find themselves encroached upon in ways both subtle and pronounced by the nation’s patriarchal mores—with attention given to the difficulties of buying a bus ...

Leaving July 1

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 unrepe...

Directed by Klára Tasovská | 90 mins | 2024
Oft referred to as the Nan Goldin of Czechoslovakia, Libuše Jarcovjáková chronicled after-dark Prague in the 1970s and ’80s, her photographs of let-it-all-hang-out gay clubs, factory hands working the third shift, and clandestine parties giving a pictu...

Directed by Jafar Panahi | 106 mins | 2013
Panahi’s follow-up to 2011’s "This Is Not a Film", also a meta-cinematic chamber piece made in defiance of the filmmaking ban imposed on him in 2010, finds the ever resourceful auteur, typically indefatigable, in a melancholic funk. "Closed Curtain" beg...

Directed by Lucrecia Martel | 89 mins | 2008
Martel’s haunting study of self-deception follows Veronica, a beloved but remote mother, after her car hits something in the road—or was it a person? As the stylish “Vero” (the late, great Maria Onetto) drifts in a daze among family and friends, the u...

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, featuring a who’s who of ...

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 Anocha Suwichakornpong | 68 mins | 2021
The construction of the so-called “Death Railway” connecting Thailand and Myanmar, a Japanese initiative during World War II, was marked by perilous, inhumane conditions and an extraordinary casualty rate. Following four young actors on a trip ...

Leaving July 1

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. Cr...

Leaving June 1

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 127 mins | 2020
The parallel narratives of a middle-aged man seeking treatment for a chronic illness in Hong Kong (Lee Kang-sheng) and a Laotian immigrant in Bangkok (Anong Houngheuangsy) eventually, finally, meet in a moment of ecstatic release.

Directed by Maria Sødahl | 125 mins | 2019
A terminal cancer diagnosis for choreographer Anja (Andrea Bræin Hovig, recently seen in Dag Johan Haugerud’s "Love"), during the holiday season, no less, reveals the deep fissures in her 20-year marriage to theater director Tomas (Stellan Skarsgård) in...

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers | 93 mins | 2019
Thai history and pre-history bubble to the surface and get packaged up for sale in this playful, surrealism-tinged venture from Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers. An unnamed woman arrives in the popular tourist destination of Krabi,...

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...

Directed by François Ozon | 103 mins | 2023
Who says crime doesn’t pay? For Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), the struggling actress at the center of Ozon’s fizzy, screwball-channeling caper, confessing to a murder she didn’t commit proves to be a canny career move. When she lands a plum ...