Now showing

Winner of the Bright Future Award at Rotterdam, director Melisa Liebenthal places herself at the center of this candid essay film. Interviewing childhood friends about their shared coming-of-age experiences, The Pretty Ones interrogates the construction of femininity and its relationship to images.

This award winner at Venice from Italian-born, Texas-based director Roberto Minervini points its sensitive camera at a nameless 12-year-old venturing through his town in solitude. Wonderfully casting non-professionals, the boy projects the loneliness and abandonment he faces to great effect.

After a 6-year wait for his follow-up to the wonderfully eccentric, tender WWI musical La France, director Serge Bozon returned in fine form with this burlesque detective film comedy starring oddball duo Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Kiberlain, investigating racial tensions in a small French town.

Next in our motley of outstanding roles from Isabelle Huppert is Patrice Chéreau’s deeply-felt period drama. Based on Joseph Conrad’s “The Return,” the film exquisitely spotlights its stirring performances, as Huppert plays one end of a crumbling marriage with quiet anguish.

First in our series exploring different sides of Isabelle Huppert’s career is Hal Hartley’s charming Amateur. Huppert’s affecting performance, written specifically for her, evokes the pop art crime films of the French New Wave, and is one of her finest contributions to English-language cinema.

On the birthday of the great Sterling Hayden, see a side you’ve never seen of the actor best known for Asphalt Jungle and his work with Stanley Kubrick. In extended conversations, a bearded, boozing Hayden spins captivating yarns of his extraordinary life: sailing, war, Hollywood, and naming names.

Sterling Hayden was a great actor and many other things: A ship’s captain, a WW2 OSS agent, a heartthrob, and a friendly witness at the HUAC hearings. This unique biopic takes a brilliantly analytical approach to this multi-faceted person, looking back at Straub-Huillet and forward to I’m Not There.

Director Joost Vandebrug has been working in the tunnels beneath Bucharest since 2011, forming deep, compassionate relationships with homeless street kids. Maintaining an attentive, pragmatic eye on his surroundings, this film is an astonishing look at the children who fall into the underworld.

Few films have fought the “male gaze” quite like this one. Argentine director Albertina Carri responds to cinema’s systemic patriarchy with this political porn: a lesbian and feminist road movie that proudly subverts paradigms of beauty, sexuality, and representation with radical determination.

We conclude our double bill of writer-director-actor Sophie Letourneur and her female-led audacities with Gaby Baby Doll. A slapstick comedy and gentle romance at once, this hard-learned lesson in solitude stars Lolita Chammah (Isabelle Huppert’s daughter!) and singer Benjamin Biolay.

First in our double bill of comedies by Sophie Letourneur is this delightful gem featuring Louis Garrel! Shot during the Locarno Film Festival, this comedy follows three unashamed women more interested in potential flings than high-brow flicks, portrayed with refreshing candor and wit.

The fiction debut from Chile-born director José Luis Valle, this deadpan comedy is an impressive masterclass in emotional subtlety and sense of timing. Minimalist in capturing the inner worlds of each character, Workers offers a biting, urgent commentary on the alienating ethics of modern labor.

With Venom and Eternity, avant-garde poet Isidore Isou had the goal to “hurt your eyes, truly!” Exclaiming his cinema prophecy in an incendiary voice-over, provoking the viewer with its entrancing, distorted images of everyday life, it is a bona fide surrealist visual revolution.

Dora Garcia’s daring film asks what Lacanian-theorist Oscar Masotta’s work from Dirty War-era Argentina tells us about the present. Sharply meshing various forms—performance, text, dramatization—Second Time Around engages with Masotta’s legacy and its context of state-sanctioned terror.

Named the 4th best Japanese film ever by the famed magazine Kinema Junpo, this effortlessly bawdy, slyly class-breaking comedy is perhaps Yuzo Kawashima’s greatest masterpiece. Though a period film, its setting on the edge of Japan’s modern transformation also makes it a clever post-war exposé.

A gorgeous debut, Peng Sanyuan’s film tackles the issue of child-abduction in China with refined performances from Jing Boran and Hong Kong star Andy Lau. Their quest takes them across the country’s stunningly diverse landscapes in order to find their missing family members.

This atmospheric coming-of-age tale from Ecuador eschews any sentimentality to convey the shyness and confusion of a young girl as she navigates the troubled waters of childhood. An award-winning first feature, carried by poignant, understated performances.

Mick Jackson’s unforgettable docudrama closes our series of dystopian stories with a bang. Reaching millions of viewers during its original airing at the end of the Cold War, Threads presents the effects of nuclear warfare in stirring detail, terrifying audiences in fear of political escalation.

One of Ingmar Bergman’s 11 favorite films, this is a personal portrayal of the relationship between sisters at the forefront of political struggle in severely different ways. Inspired by Baader-Meinhof’s Gudrun Ensslin and her sister Christine, the film won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1981.

Never before had a film been so enigmatic and transparent at the same time. Domains makes use of an unexpectedly captivating structure to stage an utterly original dissection of performance, disguised as a tale of female friendship with hints of procedural drama. Don’t wait for an American remake!

Minimal action, unique frames, and unusual editing make Mani Kaul’s debut feature Our Daily Bread a path-breaking work of Indian New Wave cinema. The film takes a radical departure from narrative cinema and uses a languid pace instead of dialogue to present the overburdened existence of women.

The emotional conclusion to Kawashima’s melodrama finds the story’s two women struggling to embrace their lovers and break free from social expectations. Can a widowed mother of two teens freely love another man? Will a wife break free of her horrible marriage? A heartrending portrait of the 1950s.

Interweaving invaluable archive footage—personal and collective—to investigate his country’s systemic violence, Colombian debutante Federico Atehortúa unveils a striking correspondence between cinema and war. Mute Fire is a poignant reflection on how images produce memory, and memory shapes history.

To celebrate International Women’s Day, we’re spotlighting Bette Gordon’s trailblazing New York indie. Ingeniously inverting Taxi Driver, it’s a brilliant story of a woman trying to find meaning (and a livelihood) in a lonely life in a grimy city. One of the best evocations of New York put to film.

Next up in our series of films set after the apocalypse is Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow’s adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic 1954 novel, “I Am Legend.” Starring the great Vincent Price, the film surpasses other Matheson adaptations through its bleak vision of urbanity shot in barren Rome.

Directed by Margarethe von Trotta, a leading figure in the New German Cinema, this story of a revolutionary socialist is another of her portraits of women at the political forefront. Featuring an outstanding performance by Barbara Sukowa, winner of the Best Actress award at Cannes.

In her first feature, Battles, Isabelle Tollenaere explored humankind’s warlike nature through battered landscapes. Now, with her ingenious yet chilling short, she discovers it in young men. They roleplay as soldiers and Tollenaere films them as documentary subjects, merging fantasy with reality.

We take a step back from Troma’s delightful genre productions for a documentary focused on the demise of physical media, which was an integral part of the vitality of the company, and, indeed, genre cinema. This is an incisive investigation into a monumental shift for both the industry and medium.

We begin our 6-film series on the infamous American independent production company Troma with their flagship title. Directed by the company’s founders, The Toxic Avenger is an endlessly inspired oddity of a superhero movie—made long before the genre became rife with convention and impersonality.