Directed by Shirley Clarke | 107 mins | 1967
A distillation of a single 12-hour interview in a room at the Chelsea Hotel with the charismatic Jason Holliday (“real” name Aaron Payne), a gay, African American cabaret dancer, part-time hustler, and full-time raconteur, Portrait of Jason grows from ...

Directed by Susan Sontag | 105 mins | 1969
In the late ’60s, a Swedish studio invited essayist, novelist, critic, cinephile, and all-around intellectual dynamo Susan Sontag to make her directorial debut in Stockholm. The resulting film, revolving around the quadrangular relationship between an ar...

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 t...

Directed by Nietzchka Keene | 78 mins | 1990
A young Björk makes her captivating screen debut in this stark, windswept fable, freely adapted from a Brothers Grimm story, about two sisters, one endowed with witchy gifts, who set out in search of a new home after their mother is murdered. Setting h...

Directed by Maria Maggenti | 95 mins | 1995
Coming of age meets coming out in this charming lesbian romcom, which pairs Laurel Holloman (later, "The L Word"’s Tina) with Nicole Ari Parker ("Boogie Nights") as two high schoolers who forge an unlikely bond: the former a tomboy on the social margins...

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 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 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 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 ur...

Directed by Clio Barnard | 91 mins | 2010
Andrea Dunbar’s first play, "The Arbor"—a grimly autofictional work about a Yorkshire schoolgirl who falls pregnant, named for the council estate where she lived—premiered in London’s West End when she was just 18. By her untimely death at age 29, she’d p...

Directed by Cate Shortland | 109 mins | 2012
Cate Shortland followed her moody and startling feature debut, "Somersault" (2004), with another bruising story of a teen girl expelled from home—in this case, by history in the making. Abandoned by her high-level Nazi parents in the wake of Hitler’s d...

Directed by Eliza Hittman | 82 mins | 2013
There’s not a single false moment in It Felt Like Love, Never Rarely Sometimes Always director Hittman’s feature debut about a sexually inexperienced south Brooklyn teenager (Gina Piersanti) who’s embarrassed to fess up to everything she doesn’t know abo...

Directed by Signe Baumane | 89 mins | 2014
Armed with a surrealist sensibility and a wicked sense of humor, New York-based Latvian animator Signe Baumane has long probed the thorny parts of life as a woman. Here, hand-drawn imagery combines with papier-mache sets and stop-motion techniques in an ...

Directed by Céline Sciamma | 113 mins | 2014
Set in the suburbs of Paris, Sciamma’s coming-of-age story stars Karidja Touré as Marieme, a 16-year-old who finds a sense of sorority, camaraderie, and mutual support when she joins up with an amateur “gang” of girls her age—much to the chagrin of her...

Directed by Claire Simon | 121 mins | 2016
The Competition begins, significantly, with the image of a locked gate—that of La Fémis, one of the most prestigious film schools in the world, offering hands-on training from working professionals and accepting only 40 students per year from hundreds of...

Directed by Elisabeth Subrin | 98 mins | 2016
Sick of L.A. and sitcom success, actress and woman on the verge Anna Baskin (Maggie Siff) looks to reconnect with her roots in the New York theater scene. But the city offers no respite in this smart and restrained drama, the sole narrative feature by...

Leaving March 1

Directed by Lucrecia Martel | 115 mins | 2017
A scruffy bureaucrat for the Spanish crown hopelessly angles for ways to get ahead in this audacious vision of 18th-century colonial empire, adapted from Antonio de Benedetto’s 1956 novel of the same name. Don Diego’s anti-epic progre...

Directed by Valeska Grisebach | 121 mins | 2017
Tensions rise during a work stoppage when a group of German laborers erecting a hydroelectric plant in rural Bulgaria suddenly find themselves with time to get into trouble in Grisebach’s patient, tonally precise, naturalist drama, which thoughtfull...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski | 104 mins | 2022
High school teacher Rachel (Virginie Efira) falls in love with Ali, and then with his 4-year-old, Leila— strengthening her desire to have a child of her own. But at 40, she knows that biology is working against her, and that cultiva...

Leaving April 1

Directed by Lola Quivoron | 106 mins | 2022
“I was born with a bike between my legs.” Motocross-mad Julia—fiercely incarnated by newcomer Julie Ledru, cast from Instagram—butters up a man who thinks she’s a potential buyer for his machine, when in fact, she’s about to ride away w...