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 Mia Hansen-Løve | 112 mins | 2021
Vicky Krieps shines in Mia Hansen-Løve’s wry and playful portrait of a woman, mother, and frustrated artist. Starring opposite Tim Roth, the pair play married filmmakers who travel for a writing retreat to the secluded Swedish island of Fårö—a place s...

Directed by Jill Sprecher | 96 mins | 1997
Like "9 to 5" (1980) before it, this crackling indie comedy introduces a set of disparate women united by the drudgery and casual sexism of office temp work. Augmenting the delightfully funny and subversive script by sisters Karen and Jill Sprecher (who ...

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 Mia Hansen-Løve | 110 mins | 2011
As in her first two features, Mia Hansen-Løve’s third reckons with the psychic fallout of a young woman abandoned by a man she loves—here, not a father but a lover. Camille, 15 (a radiant Lola Créton), is blindsided when her boyfriend, 19-year-old Sul...

Directed by Marisa Silver | 92 mins | 1984
Eleven-year-old Lonnie (Sarah Boyd) is a Lower East Side kid who comes from money, while her teenaged pal Karen (Rainbow Harvest) doesn’t come from much of anything at all. At first these opposites attract, but then budding hormones and first crushes fur...

Directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer | 94 mins | 1995
With her beguiling presence and spry, screwball energy, Parker Posey made her name as the queen of American indie cinema during its ’90s boom. The recently restored "Party Girl" captures an ascendent Posey in wickedly fine form as Mary, the to...

Directed by Jennifer Reeder | 80 mins | 2017
In writing this zesty but tender rom-com, Fawzia Mirza—also the film’s star—mined her life experience as a Muslim Pakistani lesbian living in Chicago. Zaynab (Mirza) finds herself falling for the effusive Alma (Sari Sanchez), but isn’t ready to come ou...

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 Angela Schanelec | 105 mins | 2023
Winner of the 2023 Berlinale Best Screenplay prize, Angela Schanelec’s oblique but vivid film transposes “Oedipus Rex” to contemporary Greece—though Sophocles’ tragedy is here distilled beyond easy recognition, with the rigor characteristic of the qu...

Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 86 mins | 1998
After a detour into the high heady heyday of Sunset Strip hair metal in the second film of her essential social history of rock ’n’ roll in southern California, Spheeris returned to the hardcore punk roots of her first Decline, embedding herself amon...

Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 100 mins | 1981
Without doubt one of the great rock docs, Penelope Spheeris’s headily discordant portrait of West Coast punk—her directorial debut—showcases such hardcore luminaries as X, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Germs. As pure and pungent a time capsule as th...

Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 93 mins | 1988
The scummy, lightening-in-a-bottle Los Angeles punk scene that Penelope Spheeris captured in the first “Decline of Western Civilization” (1981) had morphed considerably by the time of this second instalment, nearly a decade later: the hair was bigger...