Julian Faraut’s spellbinding documentary employs a mosaic of stunning materials to tell the story of a group of female factory workers turned Olympic champions. Reminiscent of Chris Marker’s essay films, this captivating portrait of postwar Japan is a treat for sports fans and cinephiles alike!

A true classic that still feels as fresh as ever, Mike Nichols’s prototypical coming-of-age drama pinpoints the desires and angst of a new generation about to enter adulthood. Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft bring it to life, merging with their indelible characters to create new cinematic icons.

Pinocchio and A.I.’s exploration of the desire to create artificial life is taken to boldly provocative lengths in Sandra Wollner’s incisive and unsettling modern fable. Told with cut-glass precision and eerie subjectivity, The Trouble with Being Born plumbs the darkest depths of the uncanny valley.

The enigmatic red that soaks through Laida Lertxundi’s short reifies the elusive act of political and personal remembrance. The imprints the director’s familial history with Communist organizing have left on her art practice are felt in the leaps between time, space, and audiovisual experimentation.

Fusing the personal and the collective, Laida Lertxundi’s quietly radical 16mm short links women’s private preoccupations to larger socio-political shifts. At once restless and languid, sunny Los Angeles and its vibrant multiculturalism are concretized by heartfelt anecdotes in English and Spanish.

What served as background texture in Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder is foregrounded in this lyrical companion piece, assembled from unused footage. Expanding on Javier Bardem’s supporting role, Thy Kingdom Come blurs fiction and reality for a tender portrait of the feature’s small Oklahoma town.

A mini-DV prologue announces Terrence Malick’s break with the past in his first contemporary feature, the ineffable To the Wonder. Starring Ben Affleck and a magnificent Olga Kurylenko, this impressionistic masterwork is a sensual and evocative portrait of a relationship coming apart at the seams.

Who else but Bruno Dumont to take us on a musical journey through the religious awakening of Joan of Arc? Developing his own style of electro-rock opera, the mutable French auteur delivers a cinematic feast that, in its stylistic exuberance, forges a unique path to spiritual profundity.

Described by Quentin Tarantino as one of the most powerful films of recent years, this poetic tale of childhood friendship is the latest from indie icon Alexandre Rockwell. Shot on a vivid assortment of color and black & white film stocks, Sweet Thing is a soulful hymn to hope and resilience.

Exploding the possibilities of animation and genre, Dalibor Barić’s dazzling debut dances from noir to sci-fi, from Philip K. Dick to Tarkovsky with philosophical abandon. Through a vivid array of technical effects, this hyper-sensory rush punches a hole in the fabric of nostalgia and reality.

Adapted from a short story by Stanisław Lem, Pilot Pirx’s Inquest takes a hard sci-fi approach to its interrogation of what it means to be human. With an endearing tension between its 1970s brutalist design and futurist ideas, it makes for a fascinating, Twilight Zone-esque inquiry into A.I. ethics.

Set against the snowy landscape of Chuncheon, Jang Woo-jin’s nocturnal rumination on love and midlife dissatisfaction deftly alternates between sober contemplation and magical realism. Soju-soaked conversations conjure up, not only the ghosts of the past, but also preoccupations about the future.

John Carpenter’s cult classic epic plunges his muse Kurt Russell into an expressionist New York seemingly stuck in eternal night. The iconic presences of Lee Van Cleef and Ernest Borgnine, combined with peerless widescreen camerawork, shape this into a neo-western with an anti-authoritarian edge.

After the unexpected success of Halloween, cult auteur John Carpenter kicked off the ‘80s with The Fog. This spooky-silly California ghost tale is transformed by Carpenter’s anamorphic widescreen images into something densely ethereal and rich in macabre atmosphere.

This thrilling reimagining of the literary classic paints a vividly modern portrait of the German capital and its reality for immigrants. With a riveting performance by Welket Bungué, Berlin Alexanderplatz moves with shark-like menace through the sultry fluorescence of the city’s underworld.

Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul has long been fascinated by the liminal spaces between wakefulness and dreams. Over a sleepless night in the jungle, he fashions a phantasmagorical miniature from a theatrical illusion, sparking a nebulous haze of spiritual anguish that touches the sublime.

While best known as a visionary futurologist, Stanisław Lem didn’t just look to the stars. This adaptation of his first novel uses the microcosm of a sanatorium to allegorize 1930s Poland, before the arrival of the Nazi machine elucidates the sheer inadequacy of metaphor in the face of atrocity.

Mohammad Ben Attia’s second feature, once again co-produced by the Dardenne brothers, is a compassionate portrait of a family’s seemingly inexplicable loss. Anchored by a remarkable lead performance from Mohamed Dhrif, Dear Son confirms the emergence of a major new voice in modern Tunisian cinema.

Already heralded as the female counterpart to Hong Sang-soo, Jeong Ga-young once again plays a director engaging in awkward confessionals in her hilariously irreverent meta-comedy. Heart cheekily defies the usual portrayals of women and romance, and doubles as an audacious reflection on filmmaking.

The story of an unconventional family set-up quirkily plays out on London’s picturesque canals. Spanish director Carlos Marques-Marcet reunites the two stars of 10,000km, alongside real-life mother-daughter duo Geraldine and Oona Chaplin, for this lesbian slice-of-life drama about starting a family.

A graffiti artist and prolific photographer, Dash Snow used the streets of pre-9/11 NY as his canvas. Vividly capturing his decadent scene through intimate home movies and insider testimony, Cheryl Dunn’s beautifully edited portrait is at once a vital time-capsule and a spirited ode to outsider art.

Weaving a cosmically-charged web of connections from its privileged protagonist all the way to a talking fish, Denis Villeneuve’s boldness of vision took a giant leap with this dark, philosophical comedy. Prefiguring his later work on Enemy, Maelström is an early great from the blockbuster auteur.

Before melancholic romantic Max Ophüls became a great itinerant director, making such classics as Letter from an Unknown Woman and La Ronde in different countries, he worked in his native Germany. That is, before the Nazis suppressed this richly tragic, densely romantic tale, recently resurrected.

Floating between layers of reality and imagination, installation artist and director Christelle Lheureux’s spontaneous short makes inventive use of split screen. Through musings, memories and dreams, this account of a woman’s summer loneliness presents us not with resolutions but with possibilities.

The final film by Luchino Visconti (La terra trema, The Leopard) offers a welcome return to the resplendent period dramas that followed his neorealist period. Visconti was an aristocrat with Marxist tendencies, and L’innocente is a sublime critique of the immoral excesses of the upper classes.

Kim Dae-hwan won the Best Emerging Director award at Locarno for this playful and moving drama. Steeped in the politics and societal expectations of South Korea, and with echoes of Hong Sang-soo’s formal ingenuity, The First Lap is a sharp portrait of young adulthood and stagnant relationships.

Standing as an eccentric, unprecedented object in his filmography, Ben Wheatley (Sightseers, High-Rise) reaffirmed his position as a driving force in the UK’s independent film landscape with this audio-visual tour-de-force–a hallucinatory B&W period film! A beguiling film set in a bizarre field.

This classic of ’70s “Ozploitation” is a terrifying, oppressive descent to the heart of darkness that follows no rules but its own. Long thought lost, this unforgettable horror—veritably scorched by the heat of the sun—is now a rightful cult hit, with fans including Martin Scorsese and Nick Cave!

A sharp criticism of the death penalty, Mohammad Rasoulof’s Golden Bear-winning latest film was secretly shot in defiance of his government, which considers his works to engage in propaganda against the regime. Overcoming any barriers, the Iranian auteur tells us a brave and impassioned moral tale.

This breathtaking view of the American West revealed the groundbreaking vision of Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Ilisa Barbash from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (Leviathan) through its visual and aural pleasures. Newly restored, Sweetgrass is one of the defining documentaries of this century.