30 DAYS OF FREE CINEMA

Moviegoing dreamers, there is hope for us still in this timeless, tender romance from living legend Aki Kaurismäki. Imbued with the filmmaker’s idiosyncratic playfulness and deadpan humor, this bittersweet comedy charmed even the most dour of critics and, delightfully, won the Jury Prize at Cannes.

Three lovers spin in a vortex of pent-up desire and resentment in Ira Sachs’ fresh, honest and acerbically funny take on messy, modern relationships. Just like its dynamic leads—Franz Rogowski, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Ben Whishaw—this refreshingly fluid relationship drama simply oozes sex appeal.

America is an adequate refuge but no star-spangled land of dreams when it comes to the modern immigrant experience. Recalling Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismäki with each cool monochrome vignette, this Sundance darling is threaded through with deadpan humor and performances of glimmering insight.

Lily Gladstone won a Gotham Award for her luminous performance in Morrisa Maltz’s debut feature, which follows the actor from motels and diners to the heart of American life. Creating an authentic, but dreamlike picture of the Midwest, poetry and documentary blur beautifully in this hybrid film.

Criss-crossing between London and Paris, this haunting character study doubles as a ghost story that straddles the real and the supernatural. Boasting a soul-bearing performance from Kristen Stewart where grief is made bodily concrete, the film saw Assayas share the Best Director Award at Cannes.

In Justine Triet’s Sibyl—starring Gaspard Ulliel, Virginie Efira and Sandra Hüller—chaos equates to delight and the ethically wrong is exhilarating. Psychoanalysis and cinema come together in a thrillingly erotic and perilous game blurring fiction and reality, dizzyingly escaping any classification.

Topping Cahiers du cinéma’s list of best films from last year, Albert Serra’s mesmerizing epic conjures up the malaise and paranoia poisoning the Edenic calm of sun-soaked Tahiti. Steeped in moral ambiguity, Benoît Magimel’s stunning performance embodies the corruptive power of the imperial state.

Plunging into the viscera of human bodies, the directorial duo behind Leviathan open up glistening worlds of ecstatic abstraction. Never shrinking from grit or guts, this fascinating documentary surfaces in underfunded Parisian hospitals, where doctors inject a good dose of humor into disrepair.

From controversial director Lars von Trier comes the first entry in his Golden Heart trilogy, which was followed by The Idiots and the Palme d’Or winning Dancer in the Dark. Starring Emily Watson in an uncompromising performance, Breaking the Waves remains one of Von Trier’s finest achievements.

Chaos reigns in the riotously funny debut feature from visual artist Martine Syms. With a breakthrough performance from Diamond Stingily, this hallucinatory day-in-the-life of a Black artist is a rollicking satire of art-world pretensions and a rowdy portrayal of sex and drugs in the Internet age.