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This year’s New York Film Festival is paying tribute to the wonderful experimental filmmaker Jonathan Schwartz, who died in 2018. We are honored to extend that tribute, showing the artist’s final short film. A gloriously luminous immersion into arboreal beauty, it is also a perfect film for autumn.

Actively exploring ethical boundaries and the limits of non-fiction representation, British artist filmmaker Steven Eastwood’s vital second feature quietly interrogates our cultural taboo of death and—in an act of cinematic generosity—chooses to not look away from those whose life is about to end.

We close our focus on Argentinian master of deadpan comedy Martín Rejtman with his new short, fresh from its premiere at this year’s Berlinale. Condensing all the fine irony, absurdist humour, and unassuming warmth that defines his work into only 19 minutes, Shakti is a delightful minimalist gem.

We proudly continue our annual partnership with the New York Film Festival to bring you some of the best films directly from its Projections sidebar. First up is Nicolás Pereda & Gabino Rodríguez’s oneiric journey from light to darkness—a gorgeously abstracted tale of childhood and healing.

Best-known as screenwriter for Paul Verhoeven’s pulpy cult classics Basic Instinct and Showgirls, Joe Eszterhas switches gear for this semi-autobiographical coming-of-age period film. 90s kids Kevin Bacon and Brad Renfro unite for a deeply-felt look at the immigrant experience in the United States.

Following Suspiria, Argento invoked the power of witches once more with this loose continuation (and part of the “Three Mothers” trilogy)—a fever dream crosscut between haunting synchronicities in New York City and Rome. Like its illustrious predecessor, Inferno is another irresistible nightmare.

Travis Wilkerson directs a chilling investigation of a murder his great grandfather committed and got away with. The absorbing voice of the filmmaker astutely guides us as we spiral into America’s nightmarish past and endemic racism. A different kind of horror movie.

The punk spirit of Roland Klick’s cinema finds actualization in this underdog tale of a rising musician and his overdetermined manager, a role devoured by Dennis Hopper, who noted it as the “most emotionally demanding movie I’ve ever made”. A painfully true portrait of the fight for art and life.

The uncanny life of an unsung Hollywood legend is unfurled in this intimate documentary by Michael Almereyda (Marjorie Prime). Anecdotes ranging from past romances and the inception of Blade Runner to the world flamenco are indelibly matched with tangential cinematic scenes rephrased as memories.

The final entry in our Straub-Huillet retrospective and the most recent feature by Straub (Huillet died in 2006) composes scenes from their movies to reveal a story told across their work: that of the attempt to forge community and resistance. A boldly reflective exploration of history and cinema.

Giulio Questi’s second film is a brilliantly unidentifiable genre hybrid, combining giallo with a love triangle and sharp critique of capitalism. Giddily stylized, with an ace cast including Jean-Louis Trintignant and Gina Lollobrigida, it marked an apotheosis of 1960s modernist Italian cinema.

Italian wildcard Giulio Questi pushed the limits (and censorship!) of what one could show in a movie in his brilliantly twisted cinema. With this, his debut, he forged what boldly stands today as perhaps the most bloody, reviled, and ecstatic of spaghetti westerns. Not for the faint of heart!

This October delve into the thrills and horror of maestro Dario Argento. A deeply influential disciple of Hitchcock, Argento’s run of gory, ingeniously orchestrated genre films in the 70s through early 90s capture the devilishly nightmarish side of cinema. His second film is giallo at its best.

This feature debut from Eva Husson (Girls of the Sun) is a coming-of-age film like you’ve never seen. A stylish and provocative exploration of burgeoning teenage sexuality in a remote French town, it is more broadly a nuanced look at the role technology plays in the lives of youths today.

This exquisitely crafted short—made on hand-processed black-and-white 16mm—by Sofia Bohdanowicz (Maison du Bonheur) touchingly tells of the re-discovery of a forgotten female Canadian artist. Actress Deragh Campbell leads the quest in this playful, humorous, and melancholy blend of fact and fiction.

Rejtman’s comeback 11 years after The Magic Gloves did not disappoint. Taking a suicide attempt as the starting point and surprising us at every turn, Two Shots Fired is a fascinating and subversive exercise in comedy: its sophisticated storytelling, dark humor and deadpan beauty are just genius.

“Since all of the original negatives of Pirkle-Ormond films were destroyed in a 2010 flood of biblical proportions, byNWR has done extensive restoration work on the existing duplicate 16mm film elements to present the best version of The Believer’s Heaven which has yet been made available.” —NWR

This is the second part of Patrick Wang’s deeply human, wonderfully idiosyncratic drama of a communal art center. Like part one, it brilliantly weaves multiple arts into the social tapestry of the small town as it also charts the center’s fight to exist. This small-scale epic is full of surprises.

One of the best yet most under-seen American movies of 2018, Patrick Wang’s two-part story is reminiscent of the best of Robert Altman, with its sprawling ensemble cast and wonderfully open-ended storytelling. Full of unexpected warmth, humor, and oddity, it’s a small town drama with huge stakes.

With his new film 3 From Hell now touring select cinemas, we rewind back to the rockstar-auteur’s cinematic invocation of witchcraft. An unexpected reckoning with addiction, The Lords of Salem is a blasphemous yet poignant journey which asks whether Satan is women’s tormentor or their liberator.

The legendary subverter of cinematic norms aims his lens at the Hollywood studios and all their convention, erasure, and propaganda with this fiery satire. Aligning the likes of Melanie Griffith, Stephen Dorff, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, Cecil B. Demented is a pure romp of joyous and liberating camp.

The gorgeous images and gentle storytelling of Thai director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s entrancing debut subtly build a compassionate evocation of the Rohingya refugee crisis in Thailand. A tale of empathy, culpability, recuperation, and blurred identities, it marks the voice of a bold new talent.

Our retrospective of Martín Rejtman continues with The Magic Gloves, one of the Argentine auteur’s funniest films and a unique view of Buenos Aires full of lively, strange characters. This clever, humorous take on the mid-30s crisis is another trademark mix of absurdist charm and endearing warmth.

A profound example of the unusual collaboration between Straub-Huillet and an amateur Italian theater in Buti, and a bracing adaptation of Elio Vittorini’s writing, which the duo had previously adapted with Sicilia! People, landscape, history, and storytelling merge and confront us powerfully.

Continuing our focus on the maverick but under-known New German Cinema contemporary Roland Klick is this 1970s masterpiece of youthful discontent. Fusing popular crime genres with gritty, street-level realism, it proves a fervid and rare direct gaze at West German society. Utterly relentless.

One of Ken Loach’s lesser-known films, yet no less compassionate and sincere. A story of love and solidarity gone awry, My Name is Joe portrays with care its larger-than-life titular character, interpreted with visceral fervor by Peter Mullan, who won the Best Actor award in Cannes for the role.

Ken Loach, Britain’s cinematic voice of the proletariat, even today continues his commitment to charting the lives of working people at the ripe age of 83. Rewinding back to 2002, Sweet Sixteen is one of his most potent works: a raw, uncompromising view of surviving youth at the fringes of society.

Derived from many of her own lived experiences in an industry and culture rife with exploitation and unbridled misogyny, Asia Argento manifests all of the pain and fortitude it takes being a woman and director with her self-portrait feature debut. An incendiary, unruly yet liberating lo-fi vision.

A minimalist deadpan comedy—Jim Jarmusch goes to South America?—this is a deliciously eccentric, hazy quest for a young woman’s sense of self amidst a world of would-be doppelgängers. Committed to hilarity in all forms, Martín Rejtman’s cinema conjures humor and warmth in equal measure.