Directed by Angela Schanelec | 95 mins | 2019
One of European art cinema’s most distinctive voices, Schanelec—Silver Bear winner for Best Director at this year's Berlinale—orchestrates a tense elliptical drama that’s part psychological close-up, part middle-class Berlin pastiche. Widowed mother-o...

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...

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 Joanna Hogg | 100 mins | 2007
Anna (Kathryn Worth) arrives in Tuscany to visit her school friend Verena (Mary Roscoe), Verena’s cousin, and her new husband—but to the dismay of all, 45-year-old Anna seems more interested in spending time with the trio’s teenaged kids (including a youn...

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 Ana Lily Amirpour | 104 mins | 2014
Amirpour’s atmospheric, entirely original, black-and-white thriller gave an infusion of fresh blood to the venerable vampire movie genre, revolving around the figure of a mysterious, chador-clad female bloodsucker who exercises a powerful pull on a ...

Directed by Jane Campion | 76 mins | 1986
A formally daring inquest into a fractured friendship from Campion with a screenplay by novelist Helen Garner, 2 Friends opens with once-inseparable teenage girlfriends who having drifted apart, then moves back through the years to observe the episodes th...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Ursula Meier | 98 mins | 2009
Isabelle Huppert gives a nuanced and fascinatingly opaque performance in Meier’s tragicomic tale of a fracturing family, with La Huppert starring as the uncompromising, iconoclastic matriarch of a clan that’s forsaken society to lead an...

Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve | 105 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 (...

Directed by Sophie Fiennes | 115 mins | 2018
One doesn’t have to do much to make a film about the towering, tempestuous Jamaican-born Grace Jones visually stunning and frequently outrageous, but Fiennes goes above and beyond in this documentary portrait of the powerful and pansexual glam-pop diva...

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 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...

Leaving October 1

Directed by Lina Wertmüller | 114 mins | 1974
A battle royale of the sexes/classes begins when vacationing socialite Mariangela Melatoand her Communist servant Giancarlo Giannini find themselves stranded alone together on a Mediterranean island in Wertmüller’s kinky, anarchic r...

Directed by Mireille Dansereau | 85 mins | 1972
The first female-directed narrative fiction feature to come out of Quebec, Dansereau’s sensual and beguiling Dream Life centers on Isabelle and Virginie (Liliane Lemaître-Auger and Véronique Le Flaguais), two single young women who meet through thei...

Directed by Rungano Nyoni | 93 mins | 2017
A young Zambian girl is accused of being a witch and then pressed into soothsaying service by a slick government official in this strikingly shot deadpan satire. Skewering superstition and corruption, it’s a feminist exposé of exploitation done with dazz...

Directed by Shirley Clarke | 85 mins | 1985
“Discovering the work of filmmaker and the Film-Makers' Cooperative co-founder, Shirley Clarke made me aware of the wide range of cinema’s possibilities. This 1985 documentary shot in collaboration with the late Ornette Coleman, using a diverse array of...

Directed by Shirley Clarke | 110 mins | 1961
“Shirley Clarke’s The Connection based on and adapted by Jack Gelber is a film way ahead of its time. Arguably the first film to use the “found footage” trope to tell a fictional story. This film blew my mind when I first saw it, the direction and the ...

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 ...