Closing our series of highlights from First Look is this urgent and exhilarating political parable, penned by the director’s late father, filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski. An unhinged and reverential tribute to one of cinema’s greatest legends, the film is also a trenchant look at Poland today.
Easily one of the most iconic films ever made, Fritz Lang’s classic future shock is still thrilling. A propulsive epic and mind-blowing visual symphony, Lang’s deeply influential vision is both the foundation of sci-fi cinema and a time-honored gateway to the expressive wonders of silent film.
The exuberant and stylish debut from Belarusian director Darya Zhuk cares little for 90s nostalgia, and instead is suffused with vivid sympathy, wry humor, and a heartfelt touch. Equal praise is due Alina Nasibullina, who fully embodies a young woman’s desire to change her life. A winning film.
Japanese director Shunji Iwai (All About Lily Chou-Chou) heads to China to cast a spell of romance and time in this charming, generation-hopping story of love letters, separation, and loss. Wonderful with actors old and young, Iwai spins a deliriously convoluted story juggling melodrama and comedy.
As in all great journeys, the characters of Ena Sendijarević’s award-winning debut won’t be the same after this adventure. Vibrantly nodding to Jarmusch’s beloved Stranger Than Paradise, this stylized, offbeat road movie glows with pastel-colored melancholy, Balkan humor and teen self-discovery.
Portraiture is central to French-born, New York-based artist Marie Losier’s work. In Cassandro, Losier captures body and soul of the queer luchador with unmitigated warmth and empathy, gorgeously echoing the flamboyance and resilience of her subject with the beguiling physicality of her 16mm images.
Talk about an opening sequence! A fan favorite and the most underrated of Fritz Lang’s Weimar “superfilms,” Spies is a caper for the ages. Predating the adventures of Bond and Tintin, Lang invents the modern spy film: crackling with twists, disguises, gadgetry, narrow escapes, and forbidden love.
Next up in our series of highlights from First Look is Pia Hellenthal’s audacious character study. An unforgettable 21st-century portrait, the film focuses on the elusive Eva, constantly constructing and fully exposing themself on camera and the Internet while, simultaneously, resisting definition.
Probably breaking all of the safety rules that ever existed, Emir Kusturica’s Life Is a Miracle is a zany and surrealist vignette of Yugoslavia on the brink of the Bosnian War. A cacophonous, swirling and drunken celebration, with tinges of tragedy and criticism surrounding the conflict.
Opening our double bill of historical fiction from auteur Emir Kusturica is this Palme d’Or winner from 1995. An expansive masterpiece, the film is an exhilarating and absurdist satire, earning its reputation as one of the most controversial yet vital political tales in cinema.
Besides making masterpiece after masterpiece, in the 1950s Austrian emigre auteur Otto Preminger was known for pushing the envelope of American censorship. Try this one on for size: Frank Sinatra as a drug addict! Impeccably fluid filmmaking, a legendary performance, and an unforgettable score.
You don’t need sound to be terrified. Off-brand at the time (thus, Nosferatu and not Dracula), F.W. Murnau’s Expressionist masterpiece is now iconic horror. Its spare medieval atmosphere and Max Schreck’s iconic, otherworldly vampire seems to get increasingly eerie and disturbing as the film ages.
Fueled by its easygoing lead actors, director Pang Ho-Cheung strikes the perfect balance between humor and melodrama in this charming love story. Depicting a glossy Beijing rife with young professional singles, the film is also a universal look at modern dating in all of its virtues and faults.
Continuing our series of highlights from First Look is this candid look at the unfettered virtues of youth. Shot on handheld 16mm and rendered through the generous participation of its subjects, the film tracks the end of adolescence through its intimate lens and gorgeous soundtrack.
An influence on David Lynch, George A. Romero, and Lucrecia Martel (!) this lone feature film from Herk Harvey is a bona fide cult classic of both independent filmmaking and psychological horror. An atmospheric and unsettling, haunting ghost story, innovatively shot—on a shoestring budget.
In his sinister new film, director Jonathan Glazer distills the uncanny manhunt of Under the Skin into a hellish allegory of social violence. Frozen faces, an ominous well in a dark forest, primitive rage, and an eerie score by Mica Levi reveal a cinematic sibling to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”
Neon Bull captures the world of Brazil’s vaquejada rodeo tradition through a sensual, intimate, and realist style—finding grace in the mundane, unearthing tenderness within the bestial. The human is never far from the animal in this meditative, scintillating slice-of-life portrait of a community.
Between 1960 and 1969, Godard made 17(!) features in a great burst of radical creativity. Le gai savoir, his final film of the 60s, is a work of pared-down invention and subversive pop montage, in which two beguiling icons of the New Wave (Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto) take center stage.
The cornerstone of our series on cinema from Weimar Germany is Rüdiger Suchsland’s sweeping documentary. Visualizing Siegfried Kracauer’s influential book from 1947, the film uses beautiful restorations of films by Lang, Murnau, and others to contextualize the period and showcase its masterpieces.
A pro-Soviet Goldwyn production, Lewis Milestone’s Oscar-nominated invasion drama is truly one-of-a-kind: a song-filled war film set in a besieged Ukrainian farming village inhabited by Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews, and Walter Huston. With cinematography by James Wong Howe and music by Aaron Copeland!
We proudly resume our large retrospective of Straub and Huillet with a new restoration of one of their most accessible and fierce dramas. Serving as a remarkable conduit from Sophocles’ ancient era to the present, Antigone offers a bracingly fresh vision of female power confronting the patriarchy.
We’re partnering with the Museum of the Moving Image to offer highlights from First Look, starting with an intimate portrait of a barber in Madagascar offering patrons an empathetic ear. The film lends its subject similar warmth, gradually revealing personal challenges and issues facing the nation.
We begin a new series devoted to masterpieces of the short-lived Weimar Republic with a dazzling and groundbreaking drama of modern city life. Emil Jannings delivers one of cinema’s most indelible of performances, and F.W. Murnau (Sunrise, Faust) gives the story its full range of tragedy and beauty.
After the shockingly powerful Closeness, we couldn’t wait for Russian wunderkind Kantemir Balagov’s second film. Beanpole grabbed us by the throat: an entrancing immersion into post-war turmoil and a towering ode to female resilience—with tour-de-force performances and a jaw-dropping use of color.
It’s time for a revolution! Inaugurating New Wave icon Jean-Luc Godard’s overtly political cinema, La chinoise is both prelude and prophecy of May ’68. A molotov cocktail of raw Maoism, pop colors, savage satire, and the romantic timelessness of Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Pierre Léaud.
As seen with Kantemir Balagov, master Aleksandr Sokurov is mentoring a new generation of gifted Russian filmmakers. Intriguingly blending a painterly WWI tale with contemporary orchestra rehearsals, Zolotukhin’s debut is awe-inspiring: at once a film from another era, and a pioneer of something new.
A personal and often painful conclusion to his monumental 10-year, three-part triumph, Dead Souls and its “cinema of testimony” (seen previously in Fengming, A Chinese Memoir and The Ditch) confirms documentarian Wang Bing as one of our most major, most essential of filmmakers.
This monumental yet highly intimate film is not only a feat in documentary filmmaking but also in history-making. Receiving comparison to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Wang Bing’s work on memory is a harrowing excavation of the past and an experience in listening essential for our present.
Filmed over ten years, and split into three parts, Wang Bing’s Dead Souls digs deep into one of the most overlooked chapters in Chinese history. This immersive piece of non-fiction filmmaking is a resonant meditation on memory, human behavior, and the courage of speaking up.
Russian-born, two-time Oscar-winning director Lewis Milestone is best known for his 1930 version of All Quiet on the Western Front, but we prefer this delicious noir, nominated for Best Original Story in 1947 and starring the indomitable Barbara Stanwyck and Kirk Douglas.
