Inspired by Ozu’s childhood films, Ira Sachs’s coming-of-age drama is both microcosmically intimate and vast in its thematic concerns. Anchored by a remarkable pair of performances from its young leads, Little Men essays the tension between youthful aspiration and the jaded imperatives of adulthood.

Lars von Trier has never been shy to burnish his reputation as the malevolent puppet master of his protagonists’ misfortune, but never quite so literally as in this playful documentary. One of the great films about filmmaking, The Five Obstructions is a reflexive marvel of cinematic problem solving.

We have Tarantino to thank for re-releasing Jack Hill’s under-appreciated girl-gang film in cinemas in the 1990s, helping reinstate the grindhouse director’s reputation. Rev up your engines for some pitch-perfect one-liners, ass-kicking biker girls, female solidarity, and unexpected pangs of love.

Using video for the first time, Nina Menkes dissolves her quest for the feminine and explores Jewish identity. In a Dostoyevsky-inspired story that follows a man into existential darkness, Didi Fire is her new nomad, casting a hungry, rakish silhouette in the streets, bedrooms, and bars of Tel Aviv.

Exploring the tensions between Eastern philosophy and Western modernity, this concluding part of Akio Jissôji’s spiritual trilogy is the New Wave iconoclast’s scathing critique of social power structures. An intimate, erotically-charged epic, Poem builds inexorably to its unforgettable final shot.

Diane Kruger (Inglourious Basterds) won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her powerhouse performance in this Golden Globe-winning thriller. Director Fatih Akın based In the Fade on a true story, crafting an engrossing and existential look at the survivors of terrorism.

Hovering between a remake and a visual remix, Mamoru Oshii’s fascinating Ghost in the Shell 2.0 updates his cyberpunk cult classic with new technologies such as 3D CGI. Echoing the duality of the cyborg protagonist, the mix of old and new animation styles also parallels the evolution of anime.

Influencing filmmakers from the Wachowskis to James Cameron, Mamoru Oshii’s cyberpunk classic is one of the defining anime of its generation. A dystopian vision jeweled with glass-walled skyscrapers and automatons, whose hypnotic beauty begs the fundamental question of what it means to be human.

With her new film The Five Devils out, let’s travel back to Léa Mysius’s beguiling debut: a rapturous exploration of female sexuality and teenage fears that blends ravishing color, whimsical humor, and the dreamy melancholy of a transformative summer. Bonus: that soundtrack!

Surrealist objects set the stage and a menagerie of kindred animals curl and slither across it in Nina Menkes’s shadowy, monochrome fairytale. Numbed to loveless sex and pointless wars, Marina Shoif’s saturnine croupier abandons earthbound calls and levitates toward the ether for her liberation.

Lit up by a steady flow of text messages, live streams, and dating app profiles, Eugene Kotlyarenko’s quotable gem inhabits the rhythms of millennial ennui with uncanny perceptiveness. Starring Dasha Nekrasova of Red Scare fame, Wobble Palace treads a delicate tightrope between irony and sincerity.

Entirely comprised of surveillance videos, Joële Walinga’s mold-breaking documentary emphasizes the omnipresence of cameras in modern life. Though produced under unnatural conditions, the found footage, which moves with the rhythm of seasonal changes, also paints an arresting portrait of humanity.

Barbet Schroeder doesn’t shy away from controversial subjects, be they the barbarous dictator Idi Amin or fundamentalist monk Ashin Wirathu. This remarkably open-minded portrait of the problematic lawyer and anticolonial activist Jacques Vergès questions why someone would defend the indefensible.

Kirsten Dunst won Best Actress at Cannes for this thunderous masterwork about the catatonic effects of depression. It was perhaps inevitable that Lars von Trier’s cinema of suffering would culminate in the total annihilation of humankind. Still, the end of the world has never looked more beautiful.

Willem Dafoe followed his Best Actor prize at Venice with an Oscar® nomination for his magnificent performance as Vincent van Gogh in this impressionistic biopic. Beautifully directed by Julian Schnabel, At Eternity’s Gate is an immersive portrait, not just of the artist, but his singular worldview.

Casting her spellbinding sister as an officer investigating a murder, Nina Menkes journeys into a sandstorm of military and sexual violence. Refusing resolution, this fascinating film excavates an atmosphere of haunting that is aswirl with dreamlike imagery and mesmeric incantation.

Taking to Paris for the first time, Georgian director Otar Iosseliani bottles the cheek and clamor of the crowd and shakes it up to create a rowdy city symphony reminiscent of Jacques Tati. Overflowing with curiosities, this full-of-life film also features a young Mathieu Amalric as an art thief!

Starring as fictionalized versions of themselves, director Eugene Kotlyarenko and indie favorite Kate Lyn Sheil mingle with a host of chaotic oddballs in this improvisational post-breakup comedy. Bombarded with the alluring distractions of life in Los Angeles, modern love is more fragile than ever.

The most provocative entry in Akio Jissôji’s “Buddhist Trilogy,” this experimental masterwork is a bracing examination of religious fanaticism. Stylistically radical and erotically charged, Mandala is a deeply philosophical, taboo-busting inquiry into man’s primal capacity for good and evil.

Broodingly atmospheric and replete with sharply-manoeuvred twists, this noir-inflected thriller examines the machinations of the East German regime in forensic detail. Winner of the Best International Feature Oscar®, The Lives of Others lucidly evokes the insidious terror of the surveillance state.

Stylistically ravishing and unabashedly perverse, this wickedly entertaining psychosexual thriller finds Brian De Palma at the peak of his reflexive powers. Channelling Vertigo and Rear Window, Body Double might be the ultimate Hitchcock homage, but its virtuosity belongs entirely to De Palma.

Doppelgängers and double-crosses abound in director Brian De Palma and screenwriter Paul Schrader’s dazzling tribute to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Featuring a magnificent score from Bernard Herrmann, Obsession is a deliriously melodramatic high-tension thriller from the master of the macabre.

Awash with striking imagery, Nina Menkes’s indelible portrait of alienated womanhood counters the glitz of nocturnal Las Vegas with its daytime loneliness. Sullenly glamorous, the blood-red claws sported by Tinka Menkes’s croupier evokes a gesture of resistance against the drudgery of casino life.

Akin to Agnès Varda and Věra Chytilová, Ula Stöckl saw a wild bouquet of vibrant possibility in the 1960s, and became one of the first feminist directors in West Germany. In her playful, polyphonic film about a quintet of newly independent women, modern femininity is an infectious and lively melody.

A premier example of desktop cinema, Eugene Kotlyarenko’s wild ride through cyber wonderland renders the comic mishaps of slackerdom entirely through computer interfaces. Sprouting like mushrooms after the rain, the dizzying galaxy of pop-ups and webcam windows projects a new millennial intimacy.

An atmospheric fever dream unfurling over motel rooms and prison cells, Nina Menkes’s groundbreaking first feature traces the cyclical nature of exploitation. Simmering with rage, Tinka Menkes’s potent evocation of a fractured female psyche unveils the emotional ravage of transactional encounters.

If your path has ever led to Istanbul, you most probably called a stray cat by name and touched their furry head with tenderness. Ceyda Torun’s high-spirited and affecting documentary tells the story of decades-long exchanges between Istanbulites and their feline friends in the streets.

Paul Schrader’s splendidly sordid second film dives into the sexual underworld of ‘70s California and its adult film industry. A brilliant combination of John Ford’s The Searchers, the existential nihilism of Taxi Driver (which Schrader of course wrote) and the combustible acting of George C. Scott.

Riotously campy as a 1950s housewife awakened to fetishistic thrills, Oscar® nominee Andrea Riseborough is a vortex of sexual chaos in Amanda Kramer’s genderqueer musical fantasia, also starring Demi Moore. Dripping with neon colors, Please Baby Please surrenders to the ecstasy of erotic liberation.

Drifting through transient terrains on foot and by train and boat, Nina Menkes’s hypnotic odyssey evokes unspoken feelings of exile and alienation through trance-like imagery. As the vagabond heroine, the enigmatic aura of her real-life sister Tinka Menkes strikes a powerful, autobiographical cord.