Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • France • 1960
Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger

There was before BREATHLESS, and there was after BREATHLESS. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspi...

Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis • 1999 • United States
Starring John Earl Jelks, Michelle A. Banks, Nirvana Cobb

A poignant portrait of Deaf African Americans and the complexities of love at both ends of the twentieth century, Zeinabu irene Davis’s film is a groundbreaking story of inclusion and...

Directed by John Woo • 1992 • Hong Kong
Starring Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Teresa Mo

Violence as poetry, rendered by a master—brilliant and passionate, John Woo’s HARD BOILED tells the story of jaded detective “Tequila” Yuen (played with controlled fury by Chow Yun-fat). Woo’s dizzying ...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1961 • France
Starring Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Claude Brialy

With A WOMAN IS A WOMAN, compulsively innovative director Jean-Luc Godard presents “a neorealist musical—that is, a contradiction in terms.” Featuring French superstars Anna Karina, Jean-Paul...

Directed by John Woo • 1989 • Hong Kong
Starring Chow Yun-fat, Danny Lee, Sally Yeh

Hong Kong’s preeminent director, John Woo, transforms genres from both the East and the West to create this explosive and masterful action film. Featuring Hong Kong’s greatest star, Chow Yun-fat, as a killer with...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1965 • France
Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Graziella Galvani

Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeois world behind. Yet ...

Directed by Guy Maddin • 2007 • Canada

The geographical dead center of North America and the beloved birthplace of Guy Maddin, Winnipeg is the frosty and mysterious star of Maddin’s “docu-fantasia.” A work of memory and imagination, the film burrows into what the director calls “the heart of the...

Directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer • 1975 • United States

Meet Big and Little Edie Beale: mother and daughter, high-society dropouts, and reclusive relatives of Jackie Onassis. The two manage to thrive together amid the decay and disorder of their East Hampt...

Directed by Miranda July • 2005 • United States
Starring John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson

With this compassionate, startling comedy that could have come from no other artistic sensibility, the brilliant Miranda July reveals a world both familiar and strange—an original vision of creativ...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1999 • Iran, France

The mysteries of everyday life come into astonishing focus in one of Abbas Kiarostami’s greatest cinematic achievements. A slyly self-reflexive commentary on the director’s own artistic practice, THE WIND WILL CARRY US unfolds with unhurried maj...

Directed by Sean Baker • 2008 • United States
Starring Prince Adu, Karren Karagulian, Aiden Noesi

Staking out territory on the cold winter streets of midtown Manhattan, West African immigrant Lucky (Prince Adu) uses the gift of gab and a hustler’s shrewdness to peddle designer knockoffs for Leba...

Directed by Sammo Hung • 1987 • Hong Kong
Starring Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Joyce Mina Godenzi

Legendary actor-director Sammo Hung delivers a bazooka blast of pure adrenaline in this exemplar of Hong Kong action cinema at its most entertaining. Drawing inspiration from Hollywood war films like TH...

Directed by François Girard • 1993 • Canada
Starring Colm Feore, Derek Keurvorst, Katya Ladan

A rare film biography as boldly unconventional as its subject, writer-director François Girard’s visionary portrait of iconoclastic, world-renowned pianist Glenn Gould explodes the conventions of the fo...

Directed by Julian Schnabel • 2024 • United States
Starring Jeffrey Wright, David Bowie, Dennis Hopper

Julian Schnabel’s tribute to his friend and fellow painter Jean-Michel Basquiat is less a conventional biopic than an impressionistic, sensory immersion into the much-mythologized downtown-Manh...

Directed by Charles Burnett • 1977 • United States
Starring Henry Gayle Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy

A quiet revelation of American independent filmmaking, Charles Burnett’s lyrical debut feature unfolds as a mosaic of Black life in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Stan (Henr...

Directed by Robert Epstein • 1984 • United States

A true twentieth-century trailblazer, Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised peop...

Directed by Les Blank • 1974 • United States

Les Blank considered this free-form feature documentary about beloved singer-songwriter Leon Russell, filmed between 1972 and 1974, to be one of his greatest accomplishments. Yet it has not been released until now. Hired by Russell to film him at his ...

Directed by Wim Wenders • 1977 • Germany
Starring Dennis Hopper, Bruno Ganz

Wim Wenders pays loving homage to rough-and-tumble Hollywood film noir with THE AMERICAN FRIEND, a loose adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel “Ripley’s Game.” Dennis Hopper oozes quirky menace as an amoral America...

Directed by Robert Altman • 1992 • United States
Starring Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward

A Hollywood studio executive with a shaky moral compass (Tim Robbins) finds himself caught up in a criminal situation that would be right at home in one of his movie projects, in this biting industry ...

Directed by Jules Dassin • 1947 • United States
Starring Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford

As hard-hitting as its title, BRUTE FORCE was the first of Jules Dassin’s forays into the crime genre, a prison melodrama that takes a critical look at American society as well. Burt Lancaster ...