Andrew Haigh

Pablo Larraín

Kitty Green

Kim Gordon

Ed Lachman

Ethan Hawke

Karyn Kusama

Duke Johnson

Lukas Dhont

Sophie de Rakoff

Rachel Kushner

Sebastián Lelio

Ari Wegner

James Gray

Kimberly Peirce

Chai Vasarhelyi

Reinaldo Marcus Green

Taylor Russell

Mike Mills

Samantha Morton gives a magnetic star performance in Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s prizewinning second feature, a playful suspense drama based on Alan Warner’s cult novel. Morton plays the eponymous antiheroine, a frustrated young woman who steals her dead boyfriend’s unpublished novel, calmly passing it off as her own work as she embarks on a hedonistic road trip to Spain with best friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott). With its time-scrambled, loopy rhythms and cleverly integrated mixtape soundtrack, MORVERN CALLAR is a highly original work of uncompromising beauty. Coming after RATCATCHER (1999), it confirmed Ramsay as a major new cinematic voice.

Morvern Callar

Before embracing English-language productions with THE LOBSTER (2015), THE FAVOURITE (2018) and POOR THINGS (2023), Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos scored his international breakthrough with this absurdist drama about a deeply dysfunctional Greek family. Christos Stergioglou and Michele Valley play strictly controlling parents who raise their three children in domestic prison, shielded from the outside world, until adolescent sexual curiosity leads them to mutiny, incest and violence. Shot with great visual brio, this Cannes prizewinner is boldly surreal and hypnotically weird, garnering an Oscar nomination and approving words from David Lynch.

Dogtooth

Beetlemania

Setting the Scene: Sarah Greenwood & Katie Spencer

The authentic performances in John Cassavetes’s GLORIA lit Taylor’s desire to be in a gangster film.

Taylor Russell on Gloria (1980)

Ethan’s love of music began at a very young age, when his piano-playing father introduced him to the basics of melody and chord progression. Recalling other formative encounters with sound (learning guitar from Robert Sean Leonard on the set of DEAD POETS SOCIETY; working with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy on the score for Ethan’s directorial debut, CHELSEA WALLS), he describes it as a universal form of expression: “Music is instantaneous. It doesn’t need language, it doesn’t have a class structure. Music breaks down so many of society’s walls, and it’s just so powerful.”

Ethan Hawke on Music

ANGELS WEAR WHITE

Richard Linklater’s mosaic of teenagehood


DAZED AND CONFUSED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STRANGE DARLING

CLUELESS

GETTING HIGH ON FILM

Na Hong-jin’s police procedural–meets–supernatural horror masterpiece

THE WAILING

Andrea Arnold’s intimate documentary portrait of bovine selfhood

For Ethan, all the pieces come together perfectly in Wim Wenders’s PARIS, TEXAS: “I dare anybody to make something better than that strip club scene.”

Ethan Hawke on Paris, Texas (1984)

Wimself Pt. I

Wimself Pt. II

Mike Nichols’s heartwarming classic is comfort food for Taylor, who can’t resist the soulful spark that the late Robin Williams brings to the occasion. 

Taylor Russell on The Birdcage (1996)

One of Andrew’s biggest cinematic influences is filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, whose careful choices with sound and imagery illuminate her characters’ interior lives.

Andrew Haigh on Ratcatcher (1999)

Miyazaki's Hidden Worlds

Éric Rohmer's Final Act

The New Ghana Film Scene

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

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

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

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.

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