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.

Ora che è uscito il suo nuovo film The Five Devils, vi proponiamo l’incantevole esordio di Léa Mysius, un’analisi della sessualità femminile e delle paure adolescenziali che coniuga colori accesi, umorismo estroso e la malinconia onirica di un’estate che cambierà ogni cosa. E la colonna sonora!

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.

Intervallato da una valanga di messaggi, stream live e profili di app di incontri, questa chicca di Eugene Kotlyarenko cattura i ritmi del tedio millennial con grande acume. Con Dasha Nekrasova (Red Scare), il film percorre la linea sottile tra ironia e sincerità.

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 non rifugge mai dai temi spinosi, che siano il crudele dittatore Idi Amin o il monaco fondamentalista Ashin Wirathu. Questo ritratto incredibilmente privo di pregiudizi dell’avvocato e attivista anticolonialista Jacques Vergès si chiede perché qualcuno difenderebbe gli indifendibili

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!

Il regista Eugene Kotlyarenko e Kate Lyn Sheil, presenza fissa del cinema indie, interpretano versioni fittizie di se stessi in questa commedia improvvisata su una coppia dopo la rottura. Bombardato dalle lusinghiere distrazioni della vita a Los Angeles, l’amore moderno è più fragile che mai.

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.

Come Agnès Varda e Věra Chytilová, negli anni ‘60 Ula Stöckl vide un bouquet selvatico di vivaci possibilità e divenne una delle prime registe femministe della Germania dell’Ovest. Nel suo film polifonico su cinque donne indipendenti, la femminilità moderna è una melodia allegria e contagiosa.

Perfetto esempio di “cinema desktop”, questo viaggio sfrenato nel magico mondo della rete cattura le disavventure comiche di un gruppo di fannulloni attraverso interfacce informatiche. Come funghi dopo la pioggia, la vorticosa galassia di pop-up e finestre proietta una nuova intimità tutta digitale.

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.

Se avete mai visitato Istanbul, probabilmente avrete incrociato un gatto randagio e gli avrete accarezzato la testa. Questo emozionante documentario racconta la storia degli scambi decennali tra gli abitanti della capitale e i loro amici felini.

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.

Sara Cwynar si tuffa in una valanga di schermi pensati per lo shopping e la sorveglianza in questo corto ipnotico. Catturando la compulsione che ci spinge a cliccare, scorrere e fare swipe, l’artista crea, da una massa di link ipertestuali, una visione vorticosa della bellezza estetica attuale.

Aired on PBS three years after Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 striking workers, this dramatization of labor disputes in 1910s Chicago is exhilaratingly pro-union. Maximizing the democratic reach of the small screen and its scope for densely detailed storytelling, it is a riveting and rousing watch.

Co-written with Chris Marker, this French New Wave travelogue both delights in the carnival that is American abundance and lifts the lid on cookie-cutter uniformity to reveal inequality and waste beneath. Wait for the ending: a heavenward gaze at glassy skyscrapers that is nothing short of sublime.

Reunited with his Antichrist and Melancholia collaborator Charlotte Gainsbourg, Lars von Trier returns to the life of protagonist Jo to conclude what may well prove his magnum opus. A lofty work—less lusty, but still stark and shocking—rich in metaphor and psychological insight.

Perhaps the most epic of Lars von Trier’s many provocations, this stylistically strange, sprawling and yes, substantial, character study comprehensively approaches the subjects of love and sex and everything in between. A fascinating, daring drama—featuring Stacy Martin in her first film role.

Carla Simón’s luminous feature—the Golden Bear winning Spanish submission to the Oscars®— is a vibrant generational portrait of farming life told from multiple perspectives. As the clash between tradition and modernity becomes harder to ignore, a family searches for solutions under the baking sun.

The last film in the “Diaspora Suite,” Fluid Frontiers places readings of radical texts from the Black Arts Movement, like those of Audre Lorde and Sonia Sanchez, in the middle of present-day Detroit. A vibrant portrait of a place and its people, tracing how ideas continue to live and breathe.