Directed by Chris Shepherd • 2010 • United Kingdom

It’s a holiday to remember—or not—when a young man joins his dotty elderly aunt for a Christmas party at her local Conservative Club, where the wine is flowing, the bingo is heated, and the cracks in the genteel facade start to show.

Directed by Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan • 2022 • Philippines
Starring Ammin Acha-ur, Pablo Quintos

This sublime winner of the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival follows Lynn (Ammin Acha-ur), who leaves her family’s remote home behind to traverse the harrowing roads o...

Directed by Nathaniel Kahn • 2003 • United States

Louis I. Kahn, who died in 1974, was one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century, but he left behind an illegitimate son, Nathaniel, and a personal life of secrets and broken promises. MY ARCHITECT takes us on a heartbreaking yet humo...

Directed by Joyce Chopra • 2008 • United States

GRAMERCY STORIES is an inspiring look inside a unique residence in Manhattan that provides a safe home for twenty-five gay and transgender teenagers who have experienced violence at home and on the streets. Told from their candid, often witty persp...

Directed by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou • 2004 • United States
Starring Charles Jang, Jeng-Hua Yu, Wang-Thye Lee

The American dream has rarely seemed so far away as in Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou’s raw, vérité TAKE OUT, an immersion in the life of an undocumented Chinese immigrant struggli...

Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul • 2000 • Thailand
Starring Duangjai Hiransri, Somsri Pinyopol, Kannikar Narong

Apichatpong Weerasethakul brought an appetite for experimentation to Thai cinema with his debut feature, an uncategorizable work that refracts documentary impressions of his homel...

Directed by Manoel de Oliveira • 2001 • France, Portugal
Starring Jorge Trêpa, Ricardo Trêpa, Maria de Medeiros

With the freedom and rigor that were his trademarks, Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira returned to Porto, the city where he had been born ninety-three years before, for this sublime...

Directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese • 2019 • Lesotho, South Africa
Starring Mary Twala, Makhaola Ndebele, Jerry Mofokeng

With a poet’s eye for place, light, and the spiritual dimensions of everyday existence, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese crafts a meditation on the concept of homeland and a transcen...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 2017 • Iran

For what would prove to be his final film, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami gave himself a challenge: to create a dialogue between his work as a filmmaker and his work as a photographer, bridging the two art forms to which he had dedicated his life. ...

Directed by Michael Haneke • 2000 • France
Starring Juliette Binoche, Thierry Neuvic, Alexandre Hamidi

One of the world’s most influential and provocative filmmakers, the Oscar–winning Austrian director Michael Haneke diagnoses the social maladies of contemporary Europe with devastating precisio...

Directed by Edward Yang • 2000 • Taiwan, Japan
Starring Nianzhen Wu, Elaine Jin, Issey Ogata

The extraordinary, internationally embraced YI YI (A ONE AND A TWO . . .), directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginnin...

Directed by Michael Haneke • 2001 • France
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Benoît Magimel

In this riveting study of the dynamics of control, Academy Award–winning director Michael Haneke takes on Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s controversial 1983 novel about perverse female sexuality and the world ...

Directed by Kelly Reichardt • 2006 • United States
Starring Daniel London, Will Oldham

Two old friends reunite for a quietly revelatory overnight camping trip in this breakout feature from Kelly Reichardt, a microbudget study of character and masculinity that introduced many viewers to one of co...

Directed by Noah Baumbach • 2013 • United States
Starring Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner

Greta Gerwig is radiant as Frances, a woman in her late twenties in contemporary New York trying to sort out her ambitions, her finances, and, above all, her intimate but shifting bond with her best friend, Sop...

Directed by David Gordon Green • 2000 • United States
Starring Candace Evanofski, Donald Holden, Damien Jewan Lee

Over the course of one hot summer, a group of children in the decaying rural South must confront a tangle of difficult choices. An ambitiously constructed, elegantly photographed med...

Directed by Ronald Bronstein • 2007 • United States

Longtime Safdie brothers collaborator Ronald Bronstein has described his lone directorial effort as "a rotten egg lobbed with bad aim at the silver screen." Be forewarned: audience response has been intensely divided. FROWNLAND has garnered bot...

Directed by Carlos Reygadas • 2002 • Mexico
Starring Alejandro Ferretis, Magdalena Flores

In this preternaturally assured feature debut by Carlos Reygadas, a man (Alejandro Ferretis) travels from Mexico City to an isolated village to commit suicide; once there, however, he meets a pious elderly ...

Directed by Götz Spielmann • 2008 • Austria
Starring Johannes Krisch, Irina Potapenko, Ursula Strauss

A gripping thriller and a tragic drama of nearly Greek proportions, REVANCHE is the stunning, Oscar-nominated international breakthrough of Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann. In a ragged section...

Directed by Steve McQueen • 2008 • Ireland, United Kingdom
Starring Michael Fassbender, Stuart Graham, Liam Cunningham

With HUNGER, British filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen has turned one of history’s most controversial acts of political defiance into a jarring, unforgettable cinematic experie...

Directed by Todd Solondz • 2010 • United States
Starring Ally Sheedy, Allison Janney, Ciarán Hinds

In LIFE DURING WARTIME, independent filmmaker Todd Solondz explores contemporary American existence and the nature of forgiveness with his customary dry humor and queasy precision. The film functio...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 2010 • Italy
Starring Juliette Binoche, William Shimell

The great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami travels to Tuscany for a luminous and provocative romance in which nothing is as it appears. What seems at first to be a straightforward tale of two people—played by...

Directed by Cristian Mungiu • 2012 • Romania
Starring Cristina Flutur, Cosmina Stratan

With this arresting drama based on notorious real-life events, Cristian Mungiu mounts a complex inquiry into faith, fanaticism, and indifference. At a desolate Romanian monastery, a young novice nun, Voichita ...

Directed by Christian Petzold • 2014 • Germany
Starring Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Nina Kunzendorf

This evocative and haunting drama, set in rubble-strewn Berlin in 1945, is like no other film about post-World War II Jewish-German identity. After surviving Auschwitz, a former cabaret singer (Ni...

Directed by Jonathan Demme • 2014 • United States
Starring Wallace Shawn, Julie Hagerty, Lisa Joyce

Twenty years after their brilliant cinema-theater experiment VANYA ON 42ND STREET, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory reunited to produce another idiosyncratic film version of a classic play, this t...