Andrew Haigh

Karyn Kusama

Ed Lachman

Duke Johnson

Sophie de Rakoff

Ethan Hawke

Pablo Larraín

Rachel Kushner

Lukas Dhont

Kitty Green

Sebastián Lelio

Ari Wegner

James Gray

Kim Gordon

Kimberly Peirce

Chai Vasarhelyi

Reinaldo Marcus Green

Taylor Russell

Mike Mills

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

A winning blend of surreal humor, eccentric characters and highly stylized visuals, documentary director Lance Oppenheim’s debut feature is a fascinating exploration of the Villages in Florida, the world’s largest retirement community, a kind of Disneyland for around 130,000 senior citizens. Training his focus on a handful of residents, Oppenheim finds bittersweet vignettes of sadness and joy, love and loneliness, casual sex and recreational drug use in old age. Produced by filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, SOME KIND OF HEAVEN is entertaining and warm-hearted, even when it hints at dystopian undercurrents below the surface of this plastic paradise.

Some Kind of Heaven

Director Shirley Clarke’s debut feature freely adapts Jack Gelber’s 1959 stage play about a group of New York beatnik jazz musicians jamming away in a bohemian loft apartment as they await their drug dealer. Working with real jazz players and heroin addicts, Clarke artfully blurs the lines between fiction and reality. The film’s freewheeling, handheld look remains thrillingly fresh today, while the musical performances retain a raw, immersive vitality. This mid-century milestone now feels like a design classic, less a film about jazz than a piece of cinematic jazz itself.

The Connection

Former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne added to his growing filmography of ambitious, left-field concert movies by conceiving this superb documentary, directed by brothers Turner Ross and Bill Ross IV. The film reflects the veteran art-rocker’s involvement in the arcane subculture of color guard troupes, typically high school students who perform highly choreographed formation dance routines at sports events. In 2015, Byrne organized and hosted two festival shows, featuring ten troupes dancing to new music by himself, St. Vincent, Tune-Yards, Nelly Furtado and others. A kaleidoscopic record of these grand-scale collaborative shows, CONTEMPORARY COLOR is humane, uplifting and spectacular.

Contemporary Color

An impressionistic portrait of a largely African American community in Alabama, filmed over half a decade in the 2010s, director RaMell Ross’s nonfiction feature debut subverts convention by allowing its subjects to shape the narrative with a collective, multi-person viewpoint. With creative input from Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Laura Poitras, this poignant, sporadically transcendent documentary won multiple accolades, including an Oscar nomination and a prestigious Peabody Award. 

Hale County This Morning, This Evening

An inspirational underdog sports documentary, this Sundance Film Festival prizewinner charts the gladiatorial clashes and Paralympic aspirations of the U.S. quad rugby team, a charismatic gang of athletes in wheelchairs fighting for glory in the adrenaline-pumped, bone-crunching game nicknamed murderball. Achieving a strong visual aesthetic despite their minimal budget, directors Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro shoot the hyperkinetic sports footage with exhilarating close-up intensity. But the film’s main focus is on the big personalities of the players: their mental struggles, backstage rivalries and private challenges—even their sex lives—all covered with a refreshing frankness.

Murderball

This forensically crafted debut by Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho (AQUARIUS, 2016; BACURAU, 2019) crams a huge story into a small space. In the rapidly gentrifying coastal city of Recife, real estate agents and petty criminals, security guards and clandestine lovers coexist in prickly proximity. Creating a faint undertow of psychological horror, Mendonça uses nerve-jangling sound design to invoke the hidden social fault lines between characters from different class backgrounds, their stories inextricably intertwined with Brazil’s bloody colonial history.

Neighboring Sounds

It’s 1975 in Sweden, and a young mother leaves her abusive husband, taking their two children and a suitcase to join her brother on a commune called Together. The Together gang is all leftist politics and open relationships, but most significantly, the group is fueled by compassion and curiosity. Filmed in a docu-verité style that lends a hyper-reality to the commune’s alt living, Lukas Moodysson’s uproarious comedy is a testament to trying something new in both love and filmmaking.

Together

With his fondness for icy wastelands and fringe communities, veteran German director Werner Herzog was a natural choice to rework and re-edit this Russian documentary about a vast Siberian woodland that rims the Arctic Circle. The film began as a four-hour TV series directed by Dmitry Vasyukov, aided by Mikhail Tarkovsky, nephew of cinematic legend Andrei. Distilling the material into a single feature, Herzog then added his signature gravel-voiced philosophical commentary, plus a stirring orchestral score. The result is a spellbinding winter wonderland of bleakly beautiful landscapes, stoic frontier lifestyles and dying folk traditions.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga

Searing and meticulous, Wang Qiong’s debut documentary is an intimate, minimalistic portrait of her family that tells the story of her younger sister, Zhou Jin, who was abandoned by their parents during the era of China’s one-child policy. Though Jin was eventually adopted by an uncle, the trauma reverberates across generations, captured by Wang’s observant eye over the course of seven years.

All About My Sisters

SPEAK NO EVIL

INVISIBLE NATION

THE COMPANY OF WOLVES

CONTEMPORARY COLOR

L'AVVENTURA

ANGELS WEAR WHITE

An international breakthrough for Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, DISTANT (UZAK) is a somber, hauntingly beautiful portrait of two lost souls struggling to connect in snowy Istanbul. Unemployed factory worker Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) leaves his village to seek opportunity in the big city, where he stays with his intellectual photographer cousin Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir). Both men are dissatisfied, for reasons only hinted at through brooding silences and lyrical long shots. Ceylan’s semi-autobiographical art-house drama won the Grand Prix in Cannes, alongside a posthumous Best Actor award (shared with his co-star) for 28-year-old Toprak, who died in a car accident soon after filming ended.

Distant

Even without subtitles, this classic Italian thriller’s beautiful strangeness and dynamic cinematography left Andrew “fizzing” with fascination.

Andrew Haigh on L'Avventura (1960)

To Andrew, WATERSHIP DOWN is essential viewing for children. He grew to appreciate the film’s themes of loss, suffering and community after watching it again as an adult. “In a strange way, it really has influenced me as a person and the kind of films that I want to make."

Andrew Haigh on Watership Down (1978)

The central theme of camouflage in Billy Wilder’s classic SOME LIKE IT HOT spoke to Andrew during a period of self-discovery.

Andrew Haigh on Some Like It Hot (1959)

Ship of Fools

The Walking Cure

Winner of Best Feature-Length Documentary at IDFA in 2020, this tale about the Iranian Revolution begins in Switzerland. Director Firouzeh Khosrovani draws a portrait of her parents’ marriage—her father a secular doctor who studied radiography in Europe, her mother a faithful Muslim unable to adapt to European ways—using archival footage and family photographs. The result is a modern-day story of alienation, yearning and fanaticism that illuminates a shifting era in Iranian history.

Radiograph of a Family

The only feature from Chinese writer-director Hu Bo is a mesmerizing four-hour symphony of neo-noir pessimism softened by flickers of compassion. Over a single day in a gloomy industrial city, four loosely connected characters endure a series of betrayals, arguments and violent clashes. The influence of Hu’s mentor Béla Tarr seeps into his muted color palette and balletic tracking shots. Tragically, the 29-year-old director took his own life shortly before his film's premiere. 

An Elephant Sitting Still

An absorbing fusion of observational documentary and audiovisual artwork, Swiss director Nicole Vögele’s prize-winning second feature is a masterly exercise in slow cinema. Mr. Kuo and Mrs. Lin run an all-night diner on a busy corner in Taipei, serving food to the city’s night workers and party animals. With its meticulous focus on in-between moments and dreamlike urban moodscapes, CLOSING TIME combines meditative beauty with a subtle, humanistic critique of capitalist workplace drudgery.

Closing Time

More audiovisual symphony than traditional documentary, director Bill Morrison’s found-footage masterpiece is an artful patchwork of archive clips from a long-buried trove of antique nitrate film discovered in Canada’s Yukon territory in 1978. Juxtaposing ancient newsreels with silent movie melodramas, lost Hollywood matinee idols and legendary sports events, Morrison finds haunting beauty in these degraded, poetically flawed images. The mesmerizing visuals are matched with meticulous historical research, teasing out striking connections between the Klondike gold prospectors of the late 19th century and the founders of American cinema. 

Dawson City: Frozen Time

The world is just opening up for 17-year-old Lena (Dominika Zeleníková) when a traumatic event leaves her in shock. Unable to share or process her experience, Lena enters an institution, where the only people less hospitable than the doctors are the patients. Czech director Tereza Nvotová’s feature debut benefits from confidence and sharp cinematography from Marek Dvorák, who renders the institution in muted beige but, crucially, lets some sunshine into the frame too.

Filthy

In the green, sleepy mountains of Galicia, an arsonist is released from prison, free to resume a pastoral life with his elderly mother. French-Spanish director Oliver Laxe’s cinematic intent spells itself out in its English-language title, but his film ambles along as Amador (Amador Arias in his feature debut) gets back on his feet, caring for cows and making friends. An unspeakable dread haunts the proceedings: What could go wrong in a place this beautiful? All it would take is a spark.

Fire Will Come

At the heart of Kim Mi-jo’s debut feature is a violent assault we never see, though its effects ripple across the face of O-bok (played with ruthless tragedy by Jung Ae-hwa). The film’s quiet verité style never shies away from ugliness, forcing viewers to grapple not only with the sexual violence at its center, but also with mounting gender and socioeconomic pressures for Korean women. There is little catharsis, although Kim’s work finds what comfort it can in simmering rage.

Gull

Assembled over eight years using crowd-sourced material shot in 70 countries, Serbian director Boris Mitić’s “whistleblowing documentary parody” is a delightfully strange experiment. Iggy Pop narrates the sardonic thoughts of unseen protagonist “Nothing” in rhyming verse, over a hypnotic montage of sunsets, train journeys, cloudscapes, beaches and more. Mitić may lean heavily toward the absurd, but his wry insights also recall essay-film experts like Chris Marker and Patrick Keiller.

In Praise of Nothing

Building on her work as a visual artist, Greek director Janis Rafa delivers a strikingly original feature debut with this compellingly weird road movie about a pair of obsessive animal lovers whose lives revolve around scavenging roadkill and conducting pet funerals. Played by Penelope Tsilika and Dimitris Lalos, this odd couple appear to live a pretty animalistic existence themselves, sharing minimal dialogue and a queasy disregard for personal hygiene. Named after a parasitic disease that kills humans and animals alike, KALA AZAR serves up a feast of earthy humor and tender emotional vignettes, all spiced with stomach-churning close-ups of flesh, food and filth. Deliciously strange.

Kala azar

Ena Sendijarević’s debut feature transports a teen raised in the Netherlands to Bosnia to meet her estranged father. Alma (Sara Luna Zoric) travels alongside her cousin and his best friend, and the three feel like real teenagers: moody, deadpan and wry. The film maintains a cool lo-fi pitch that exists in the grand tradition of lackadaisical road movies, its moments of heartbreak and heartburst rendered hazy and vibrant courtesy of Emo Weemhoff’s pastel-tinged cinematography.

Take Me Somewhere Nice

Andrew describes this visually bold film—his favorite of Ingmar Bergman’s—as “a howl of pain” interlaced with moments of tenderness and beauty.

Andrew Haigh on Cries and Whispers (1972)

Karyn illustrates how Akira Kurosawa’s “perfect genre premise” of a crime drama taught her how framing can inform our understanding of characters.

Karyn Kusama on High and Low (1963)

Music for Grief

The New Ghana Film Scene

In contrast to the film’s menacing tone, what Sophie responded to most in Alan J. Pakula’s KLUTE was the brilliant costume work by Ann Roth—“the miniskirts and knee-high boots tipping over from the ’60s to the ’70s”—and how it helped build the characters.

Sophie de Rakoff on Klute (1971)

After meeting director Kleber Mendonça Filho at the Sydney Film Festival, Ari was blown away by the aural journey of the director’s NEIGHBORING SOUNDS. “I love when a film is so local that it becomes universal,” she says about the Recife, Brazil–based drama.

Ari Wegner on Neighboring Sounds (2012)

I'm Still Alive

Drawing on her Ukrainian family heritage, Australian director Kitty Green made a splash with this gutsy debut feature, which she shot while embedded for 14 months with the then-Kyiv-based feminist protest group Femen. Green’s big revelation is how this punky Pussy Riot-style collective, infamous for their headline-grabbing topless stunts, was created and controlled by a shadowy male Svengali, who has since been ejected. But the twist only adds depth and complexity to a close-up study of fearless riot grrrls rebelling against entrenched and violent patriarchal forces—a timely story given a sharper edge since the Maidan Revolution and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine Is Not a Brothel

British writer-director Andrew Haigh is best known as a meticulous chronicler of LGBT love stories on big and small screen, but here he dissects the dynamics of long-term heterosexual marriage with an equally sharp eye. Veteran Britfilm icons Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling co-star as an aging couple whose settled routine of comforting certainties is suddenly rocked by long-dead ghosts from the past. Teasing out the gnawing doubt and latent unease lurking just below the placid surface of suburban domestic life, Haigh’s forensically observed psychodrama won multiple prizes and accolades, including an Oscar nomination for Rampling.

45 Years

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

Director John Dahl gives vintage film noir tropes a sassy postfeminist twist in this deliciously amoral erotic thriller. Linda Fiorentino is on knockout, career-best form as Bridget Gregory, a sociopathic femme fatale who flees Manhattan with a mountain of illegal drug money stolen from her crooked doctor husband, played by Bill Pullman. Using sex, blackmail and lethal sarcasm to double-cross every drooling male standing in her way, Bridget is a magnetic antiheroine, a material girl living in a material world. Dahl’s hugely enjoyable neo-noir contains winking homages to Billy Wilder’s hard-boiled classic DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944).

The Last Seduction

Married directing duo Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (a Galerie curator) and Jimmy Chin first met while working together on this visually spectacular, award-winning documentary, which chronicles a perilous attempt by Chin and his fellow climbers to scale the towering Shark’s Fin rock face of Meru Peak in northern India. MERU is an immersive, adrenaline-pumping thrill ride, thanks not just to its majestic scenery but also its close-up examination of the compulsive risk-taking that almost proves fatal for several of the climbers. Vasarhelyi and Chin have since collaborated on numerous acclaimed features including Oscar-winner FREE SOLO (2018), THE RESCUE (2021) and NYAD (2023).

Meru

Writer-director Andrew Haigh’s prize-winning sophomore feature revolves around a short but emotionally charged affair between two young men, each guarding secrets. Semi-closeted lifeguard Russell (Tom Cullen) and blunt-talking artist Glen (Chris New) meet in a gay club, their brief encounter stretching into a long weekend of sex and drugs, anguished confession and political discussion. Naturalistic yet lyrical, this queer chamber drama explores the space between our private and public selves. 

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