Annemarie Jacir

Ed Lachman

Kitty Green

Taylor Russell

Mike Mills

Bryan Fogel

Kim Gordon

Duke Johnson

Pablo Larraín

Karyn Kusama

Chai Vasarhelyi

Andrew Haigh

Rachel Kushner

Ethan Hawke

Lukas Dhont

Sophie de Rakoff

Sebastián Lelio

Ari Wegner

James Gray

Kimberly Peirce

Reinaldo Marcus Green

An emotionally charged, politically conscious drama that plays like a modern-day twist on Charles Dickens, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s SHOPLIFTERS is a panoramic portrait of an impoverished Tokyo collective of social outcasts and petty criminals. The head of the household is Osamu (Lily Franky), a wily patriarch who keeps his ramshackle artificial “family” afloat using theft and fraudulent pension claims. He even abducts a young girl (Miyu Sasaki) but for benign, compassionate reasons. Partly inspired by real news stories, Kore-eda’s delicately observed ensemble drama won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.

Shoplifters

Playfully riffing on folkloric fable tropes, THE TALE OF KING CRAB stars Gabrielle Silli as Luciano, a boozy vagabond in 19th-century Italy whose forbidden love for a beautiful local girl (Maria Alexandra Lunga) leads him into conflict, tragedy and exile. Luciano later poses as a priest in Patagonia, where his fanciful theory about magically gifted crabs leading the way to buried treasure creates more havoc. Backed by an impressive non-professional cast, writer-director duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis craft an enchanting and visually arresting blend of fairy tale and Homeric odyssey that recalls Werner Herzog in his prime.

The Tale of King Crab

A rich collaboration between two Iranian cinematic masters, Jafar Panahi’s hard-hitting crime drama is based on an Abbas Kiarostami screenplay. Panahi makes a bold choice by casting a non-professional leading man, the paranoid schizophrenic pizza delivery driver Hossein Emadeddin, to play a fictionalized version of his real self. Opening with a bravura single-shot robbery sequence, CRIMSON GOLD then flashes back to the social, financial and mental pressures that have driven him to such desperate extremes. Casting a critical eye on Iranian society, Panahi’s unorthodox thriller won multiple festival prizes, but was inevitably banned from screening in his homeland.

Crimson Gold

Swedish writer-director Isabella Eklöf makes a powerful, unsettling statement with her debut feature, which chronicles the volatile tensions between drug lord Michael (Lai Yde) and his glamorous young girlfriend, Sascha (Vic Carmen Sonne), during a sizzling summer vacation on the Turkish Riviera. HOLIDAY is a blaze of bright colors, gorgeous outfits, luxury villas and sunny beachscapes, but violence and toxic masculinity are ever present, including a sickeningly graphic rape scene shot with jarringly cool detachment. Eklöf’s stylish thriller is purposely spare on dialogue or psychological shading, provocatively daring audiences not to enjoy its slick, sexy, nauseating horror.

Holiday

French director Bertrand Blier’s breakthrough film, a controversial hit on release, helped launch Gérard Depardieu to superstar fame. A riotous, profane, darkly comic road movie about a pair of gleefully amoral petty criminals (Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere) who force themselves sexually on multiple women, it is problematic by modern standards. However, Blier’s anarchic, wilfully vulgar style and strong female characters make the story more subversive satire on bourgeois propriety than dubious male fantasy. The stellar ensemble cast also features Miou-Miou, French screen queen Jeanne Moreau and a young Isabelle Huppert. 

Going Places

Loosely based on a true story, Werner Herzog’s existential epic about an entrepreneurial 1890s hustler (Klaus Kinski) who endeavors to hoist a 300-ton steamboat over a mountain in the remote Amazon to access and extract the territory’s lucrative natural resources (all to fund his fever dream of building an opera house in the jungle) is as delirious as its premise. This being Herzog, no effort was spared to achieve a transcendent realism, with the production re-creating the feat unassisted by technology or shortcuts. A companion piece to AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD that returns Herzog to the primordial cauldron of the Peruvian Amazon and reunites him with his demonically charismatic leading man, the film emphatically reaffirms the futility of man’s attempts at “civilizing” the natural world. (Its besieged production is documented in Les Blank’s BURDEN OF DREAMS, a monumental film in its own right.)

Fitzcarraldo

Five Low-Budget Triumphs

STATE OF MOVIES

NON-FICTION

THE TALE OF KING CRAB

GODS OF MEXICO

A monthly chat on what we're watching, what we're loving and what we can't wait to see

FIRST FRIDAYS

MAKING FILM IN EGYPT

Building on her powerful debut film, UKRAINE IS NOT A BROTHEL (2013), Australian director Kitty Green’s superbly crafted short documentary creates a mosaic portrait of contemporary Ukrainian society by utilizing the inspired conceit of screen-testing young girls for an imaginary biopic of gold medal–winning Olympic skater Oksana Baiul. These concise, emotionally charged snapshots reveal less about sport than about the lingering wounds of a war-torn nation still struggling to escape decades of oppression, occupation and ingrained sexism. THE FACE OF UKRAINE: CASTING OKSANA BAIUL won a Jury Prize at Sundance and created the innovative formal template for Green’s award-winning feature documentary CASTING JONBENET (2017).

The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul

A highly original hybrid of documentary, staged drama and experimental essay-film, THE ARBOR pays moving tribute to the British social-realist playwright Andrea Dunbar, who died in 1990 at the tragically young age of 29. Shooting in Dunbar’s impoverished neighborhood in the northern English city of Bradford, director Clio Barnard uses both professional actors and local amateurs to voice verbatim audio interviews by the writer, her family, friends and colleagues. Barnard’s absorbing film also includes restaged scenes from Dunbar’s semi-autobiographical plays, which address issues of class inequality, racism and sexism with a bleak but darkly funny sensibility.

The Arbor

Highly adept at keeping viewers guessing with her droll narrative swerves and playfully ambivalent tone, Austrian writer-director Jessica Hausner ruminates on the mystical power of love, empathy and religious faith in LOURDES, which follows a tour party of sickly pilgrims visiting the French town of the same name. Sylvie Testud gives a luminous performance as Christine, a wheelchair user with severe multiple sclerosis, who appears to undergo a miraculous recovery during her visit to the town, which is celebrated by devout Catholics for its alleged healing properties. A young Léa Seydoux co-stars in Hausner’s delightfully eccentric, magical mystery tour.

Lourdes

Chinese writer-director Vivian Qu’s gripping second feature is a tightly controlled, noirish thriller that struck a timely chord with the emerging #MeToo movement. Wen Qi stars as Mia, a 15-year-old hotel worker in a sleepy beach town who faces tough moral choices after witnessing a sexual assault on two underage girls. Because Mia has shaky legal status as an undocumented migrant worker, and the male suspect has powerful government connections, the odds are heavily stacked against justice prevailing in a rigged, sexist system. Qu’s prizewinning depiction of contemporary Chinese society is quietly furious, with a biting political subtext.

Angels Wear White

Kimberly Peirce’s debut feature BOYS DON’T CRY hinges on a pivotal love scene. Up to the point of making that film in 1999, the director had not seen many authentic depictions of queer intimacy on film. Informed by core film references, including the heterosexual power dynamics of Federico Fellini’s 8½ and Hal Ashby’s COMING HOME, she created an original moment that felt true to her characters' own identities and love story.

The Scene: Boys Don't Cry

Kitty breaks down the Human Resources scene from her 2019 film THE ASSISTANT, explaining how the exchange between a low-level female employee and male company rep was influenced by current events and deep research, as well as by Michael Haneke’s 2001 film THE PIANO TEACHER. Shouting out the performances of actors Julia Garner and Matthew MacFadyen, she discusses the process of transforming a generic corporate encounter into a nuanced exploration of power dynamics in the workplace—and beyond.

The Scene: The Assistant

Revisiting the begonia fields in Belgium where his 2022 coming-of-age film was shot, Lukas details the production process behind the flower-planting scenes.

The Scene: Close

“A film only works if there is something underneath that is saying something a little bit deeper than what's on the surface.” Reflecting on his career journey, Andrew unpacks his childhood film inspirations and explains how they informed the directing choices for his 2023 feature, ALL OF US STRANGERS.

Andrew Haigh The Scene: All of Us Strangers

Strong Roots

Adolescence in One Take

Coppola's Conservationist

Morocco's Dissident Filmmakers

Artfully shot to resemble a raw reportage documentary, Annemarie Jacir’s career-making graduation thesis short is a thriller about the everyday struggles of Palestinians. Reem Abu-Sbaih plays a fictionalized version of Jacir, a tenacious film director leading a small team on a taxi journey from the West Bank to Jerusalem, their plans disrupted by roadblocks, detours and hostile military interrogations. Part gritty drama, part visual poem, LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES won multiple prizes while making history as the first short from the Arab world—and the first film by a Palestinian female director—to be selected for the Cannes Film Festival.

Like Twenty Impossibles

An austere but strikingly beautiful drama about grief, crime, poverty and broken families in the Mississippi Delta, BALLAST is the highly assured debut feature of writer-director Lance Hammer. Micheal J. Smith Sr. plays Lawrence, a man wrestling with suicidal depression following his twin brother’s death, which forces him into a complicated reconciliation with his sister-in-law (Tarra Riggs) and her 12-year-old son (JimMyron Ross). A terrific cast, mostly Black and non-professional, helped improvise their own characters and dialogue from Hammer’s spare script. This humane, quietly powerful family saga won the Best Directing and Best Cinematography awards at Sundance.

Ballast

A hard-bop trumpet prodigy who played with Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and other legends, Lee Morgan died at the age of 33, gunned down by his long-time romantic partner, Helen, at an East Village jazz club in the depths of a blizzard. Interweaving frank audio interview clips with Helen, memories from Lee’s fellow musicians, and exquisitely assembled archive footage, Swedish director Kasper Collin’s documentary untangles this knotty tale with a sensitive, lyrical touch. Unfolding almost like cinematic jazz, I CALLED HIM MORGAN manages to find sympathy for both players in a tragic, toxic love story.

I Called Him Morgan

Infamous in his native South Korea for provocation and controversy, director Im Sang-soo’s prizewinning erotic thriller is a lethally intoxicating cocktail of sex, glamor, class and power dynamics. Iron-willed maid Eun-yi (Jeon Do-yeon) is hired to work for a superrich couple, businessman Hoon (Lee Jung-jae) and his pregnant wife, Haera (Woo Seo). But Hoon’s sexual advances toward Eun-yi ignite a war between servants and masters that spirals into an orgy of bloody revenge. THE HOUSEMAID is a loose remake of Kim Ki-young’s 1960 film of the same name, a Korean cult classic and key influence on Bong Joon Ho’s PARASITE.

The Housemaid

Swedish director Göran Hugo Olsson’s archive-heavy documentary condenses hundred of hours of vintage 16mm footage from an incendiary period in American history, originally filmed by Swedish television crews and then largely forgotten for more than 30 years. Featuring interviews with radical icons like Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE covers the birth of the Black Panthers, anti–Vietnam War protests, the Attica prison riots, the devastating effect of heroin in Black communities and more. Featuring a superb soundtrack, plus contemporary commentary from Davis, Questlove, Erykah Badu and others, Olsson’s cinematic history lesson is rich, fascinating and admirably complex.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

Senegalese musical superstar, activist and occasional politician Youssou N’Dour is the subject of this engaging documentary from future Oscar-winning director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. N’Dour is widely celebrated as one of Africa’s prime cultural ambassadors on the world stage, but this film chronicles the scandal around his 2004 album EGYPT, a Grammy-winning hit in the U.S. that was boycotted in Senegal for controversially blending music with devotional lyrics steeped in Sufi Islam. Following the singer on tour at home and abroad, Vasarhelyi delivers a rich musical feast, but she also touches on deeper fault lines running through the post-9/11 geopolitical landscape.

Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love

Revisiting French high-wire artist Philippe Petit’s audacious 1974 tightrope walk between the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, British director James Marsh’s Oscar-winning documentary has the pulse-racing urgency of a real-life heist movie. MAN ON WIRE blends archival footage, contemporary interviews and dramatized reconstruction to capture the courage and poetry of Petit’s daredevil feat. Despite breaking the law, his headline-grabbing stunt ultimately gave a promotional boost to the WTC, which was still under construction and not widely liked at the time. Post 9/11, Marsh’s film unavoidably plays like an elegy for the twin towers.

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