Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher drew on her own childhood memories for this prizewinning coming-of-age drama about a family of beekeepers struggling to maintain their impoverished utopian lifestyle in rural Tuscany. Maria Alexandra Lungu plays Gelsomina, the starry-eyed young girl torn between taking over her beloved father’s ailing apiary business or escaping to a more thrilling alternative world, epitomized by Monica Bellucci’s glamorous reality-TV hostess. Full of bittersweet nostalgia, gorgeous visual touches and charmingly natural performances, THE WONDERS elegantly dissects the eternal tensions between idealism and commerce, tradition and modernity, family ties and private dreams.

The Wonders

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

Kelly Reichardt’s tense period drama brings to life a perilous journey on the Oregon Trail: a brutal, embittered undertaking for a handful of westward sojourners (including Michelle Williams) and their less-than-trustworthy guide. The Portland-based auteur interweaves ruthless American capitalism and modern skepticism, aided by dazzling and dizzying camerawork by Reichardt regular Christopher Blauvelt, in a film that marked the director as one of the great feminist filmmakers of our time. 

Meek's Cutoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

A well-heeled dinner party in the Hollywood Hills takes a disturbing detour into a twilight zone in director Karyn Kusama’s THE INVITATION, a superbly crafted thriller whose latent tension gradually builds to a deafening roar. Logan Marshall-Green and Tammy Blanchard play a divorced couple meeting again after a family tragedy and a lengthy break, their relaxed gathering of old friends unraveling into anarchy as vanishing guests, shock revelations, violent outbursts and creepy cult members sour the laid-back mood. Co-written by Kusama’s husband, Phil Hay, this classy nerve-jangler wrings maximum chills from its pressure-cooker setting.

The Invitation

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

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

The boldness of Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire-Western genre hybrid spoke to Karyn, illuminating a future of filmmaking she wanted to be a part of.

Karyn Kusama on Near Dark (1987)

Taylor clocks the impending doom that sneaks up on audiences watching a mother act out against her caged environment.

Taylor Russell on Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Every time she watches Lucrecia Martel’s THE HEADLESS WOMAN, Ari receives something new from it. The experience of discovering alongside the protagonist over the course of the film is very engaging: “You feel very much with her.”

Ari Wegner on The Headless Woman (2008)

Kitty Green’s art-teacher mother first recommended Jessica Hausner’s beautifully composed films. “She knows how to use a frame really well,” says Kitty of Hausner’s work. “They’re like paintings, every single one of them.”

Kitty Green on Lourdes (2009)

“It was the first time I had seen a documentary that looked like an editorial,” Sophie says of this biographical film about Diana Vreeland, the legendary, acerbic HARPER’S BAZAAR and VOGUE editor. “The documentary itself is almost like an artifact.”

Sophie de Rakoff on Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel (2011)

Martha Coolidge’s VALLEY GIRL inspired Karyn to pursue her dream of directing. She also found a crush on a young Nicolas Cage.

Karyn Kusama on Valley Girl (1983)

Maïwenn’s forensic look at the life cycle of a dysfunctional relationship is “a crazy, sexy, heartbreaking, toxic love story that’s very tasteful and French,” says Taylor.

Taylor Russell on My King (2015)

Karyn finds Jane Campion’s AN ANGLE AT MY TABLE to be a rare portrait of a female artist: a film  that expresses both the desire to create and the strength it takes to find one’s voice and not be discarded.

Karyn Kusama on An Angel at My Table (1990)

Best known for her closely observed character studies and quirky period pieces, revered art-house writer-director Kelly Reichardt takes a rare detour into suspense-thriller territory with this gripping crime procedural shot with crisp elegance by Reichardt regular Christopher Blauvelt. A mesmerizing Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard play environmental activists plotting to blow up a dam. A coolly composed, purposely oblique, thought-provoking commentary on the sociopathic underside of righteous idealism. 

Night Moves

Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s spare and unflinching meditation on the industrial food complex is more high-concept art project than activist propaganda—think KOYAANISQATSI rather than SUPER SIZE ME—but its dispassionate portrait of the scale, machinery, labor and practices behind our meals packs a wallop. Bucking documentary convention, the film forgoes talking-head interviews, voice-over narration and obvious agenda in favor of long tracking shots and fixed cameras to present a nominally depoliticized work of quiet radicalism. 

Our Daily Bread

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

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

Partly inspired by actual events, this low-voltage suspense thriller stars Matt Damon and Casey Affleck as hapless hikers whose ill-advised ramble through a remote desert wilderness slowly turns from farce to tragedy. Veteran indie director Gus Van Sant returns to his more experimental roots, paring down plot and dialogue in this haunting exercise in narrative minimalism. The spare, poetic landscapes and wordless extended tracking shots pay homage to Hungarian maestro Béla Tarr.

Gerry

Distant echoes of Dostoyevsky ripple through Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s chilly crime drama set in a contemporary Moscow that appears lawless, godless and hopeless. The legendary Nadezhda Markina plays a middle-aged nurse facing a desperate dilemma, even contemplating murder to help her impoverished family. As with Zvyagintsev’s other work, from THE RETURN (2003) to LEVIATHAN (2014), this elegantly somber Cannes prizewinner couches bleak social commentary in lyrical beauty.

Elena

Playing like a real-life true-crime thriller, Oscar-winning director Bryan Fogel’s gripping documentary chronicles the gruesome killing of exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018, a Mafia-style execution seemingly ordered by the kingdom’s ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Adding emotional depth and forensic detail to a widely reported news story, THE DISSIDENT features interviews with key players in this harrowing case of state-sponsored murder, including Khashoggi’s bereaved fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, and former CIA chief John O. Brennan. Fogel also widens his focus to profile other brave media campaigners challenging the Saudi regime’s bloodthirsty censorship war against its critics.

The Dissident

Structured in three symphonic movements, this panoramic portrait of Mexico and its peoples from first-time director Helmut Dosantos is visually ravishing and superbly crafted, as much cinematic poem as ethnographic documentary. Also serving as cinematographer and editor, Dosantos switches between color and monochrome as he wordlessly examines the professions, rituals, costumes and lifestyles of Mexico’s indigenous rural population, pointedly labeling chapters with the names of Aztec gods as well as geographic region. Dosantos may dispense with language, but these painterly tableaux speak volumes about the soul of a nation.

Gods of Mexico

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

Prolific Chilean director Raúl Ruiz began work on SOCIALIST REALISM in 1972, but he was forced to abandon it and flee the country the following year, when Augusto Pinochet’s CIA-backed coup toppled democratically elected left-wing president Salvador Allende. Although Ruiz died in 2011, this long-shelved project was finally restored, completed and released by his filmmaker widow, Valeria Sarmiento. Interweaving stories of factory workers and leftist intellectuals, Ruiz casts a positive but critical eye on the Allende period, defying documentary naturalism with an antic, lyrical, Godardian spirit. Tragically, the film’s cinematographer Jorge Müller Silva was detained after the coup and remains missing to this day.

Socialist Realism

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

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

Boldly staged and formally daring, Joshua Oppenheimer’s Oscar-nominated documentary shines a light on one of the semi-forgotten atrocities of the Cold War: the state-sponsored mass execution of Indonesian communists and other dissidents following the failed coup of September 1965. With jaw-dropping audacity, Oppenheimer and his codirectors persuade their key interviewees, unpunished and mostly unapologetic killers, to reenact their crimes on camera in the style of gangster and Western movies. Boasting Werner Herzog and Errol Morris as executive producers, the film won international laurels and spawned a 2014 sequel, THE LOOK OF SILENCE.

The Act of Killing

The brutality inflicted on children during Russia’s wars with the breakaway republic of Chechnya is laid bare in Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo’s documentary triptych, which is relentlessly bleak but also grimly compelling and strikingly beautiful. Alternating between color and monochrome, it comprises self-contained chapters shot at a juvenile military academy near St. Petersburg; in the ruins of the Chechen capital, Grozny; and at a home for war orphans. Gird yourself for stark accounts of inhuman violations committed by Russian soldiers in this award-winning depiction of hell on Earth.

The 3 Rooms of Melancholia

A powerful behind-the-scenes documentary about KHABAR LAHARIYA, an Indian news platform run by women from the socially ostracized Dalit underclass, WRITING WITH FIRE offers an inspirational portrait of courage, determination and grace under pressure. Co-directors Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh also give this politically charged story a personal dimension, exploring how the publication’s impressively tough editor and two junior reporters wrestle with domestic and family pressures while pursuing high-risk stories about murder and corruption. This Sundance prizewinner became the first ever Indian Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature.

Writing with Fire

Karyn’s fandom of Warren Beatty as an actor and filmmaker goes back to her childhood, and she shares how the weighty topics he tackles have stood the test of time: Communism as social justice in REDS, and the delusions of American democracy in THE PARALLAX VIEW.

Karyn Kusama on Parallax View (1974) & Reds (1981)

The indelible one-liners (which he committed to memory) of Alex Cox’s REPO MAN taught a young Ethan that this film didn't play by the usual rules: “There aren't many punk rock movies, and that is a punk rock movie.”

Ethan Hawke on Repo Man (1984)

Roundly dismissed in its own time, the Russ Meyer–directed, Roger Ebert–penned camp classic became a formative film for Karyn, who was drawn to its surface gloss and buried subversion.

Karyn Kusama on Beyond The Valley of the Dolls (1970)

After repeat viewings BLADE RUNNER embedded in Sophie’s subconscious, even inspiring her approach to costume design. “I was so attracted to the futuristic aspects and the flying cars and the woman running in the see-through trench. That’s the one movie that has visually shaped how I look at things,” she says.

Sophie de Rakoff on Blade Runner (1982)

It took several viewings for Kimberly to fully appreciate the complexity of Roman Polanski’s neo-noir. “Literally every line of that script is just genius,” she says.

Kimberly Peirce on Chinatown (1974)

Mike Nichols’s coming-of-age landmark is a film Reinaldo loves for its capacity to encourage personal introspection.

Reinaldo Marcus Green on The Graduate (1967)

Kristen Stewart is on spellbinding form in this offbeat Parisian art-house ghost story, a hasty reunion with CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (2014) director Olivier Assayas, who wrote the lead role especially for her. Stewart plays Maureen, a downtrodden personal assistant to a bitchy supermodel, whose lonely life on the sidelines of the glamor industry takes an intriguingly eerie turn following a family bereavement. Both director and star keep viewers guessing with subtle shifts in tone and register, creating an alluring blend of spooky highbrow genre exercise and psychological thriller. PERSONAL SHOPPER won multiple awards, with Assayas sharing Best Director prize at Cannes.

Personal Shopper

Combining fierce beauty with prickly personal emotion, writer-director Claire Denis draws on her own childhood in French colonial Africa to craft this masterful, politically charged thriller. Isabelle Huppert burns up the screen as Maria Vial, a coffee plantation boss in an unnamed African country who stubbornly ignores the bloody civil war erupting around her as she fights to bring in the latest harvest. Featuring strong supporting performances from Christophe Lambert as Maria’s shifty ex-husband and Isaach De Bankolé as a charismatic rebel fighter, WHITE MATERIAL examines the lingering wounds of colonialism through a refreshingly complex lens, devoid of cartoon villains or glib solutions.

White Material

After a run of more controversial, sexually explicit films, director Catherine Breillat took an outwardly more conventional turn with this sumptuous historical romp about a 19th-century Parisian libertine (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) torn between his hot-blooded Spanish mistress (Asia Argento) and his virginal new bride (Roxane Mesquida). But the veteran provocatrice of French cinema has little time for convention, transforming a costume drama into a no-costume melodrama full of bodice-ripping lust, gender-twisting power games and lingering female-gaze shots of Aattou’s ripe, androgynous beauty. Freely adapted from Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s scandalous 1851 novel, THE LAST MISTRESS takes carnal pleasure in its juicy perversions and dangerous liaisons.

The Last Mistress

Paris is purgatory in BASTARDS, a relentlessly bleak contemporary thriller which plunges French director Claire Denis deep into film noir territory. Drawing on William Faulkner’s controversial 1931 novel SANCTUARY, this dark revenge saga stars Vincent Lindon as Marco, a landlocked sea captain investigating his brother-in-law’s apparent suicide. In defending his sister, Sandra (Julie Bataille), and niece, Justine (Lola Créton), against reptilian businessman Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor), Marco is sucked into a nightmarish netherworld of betrayal, incest and sexual violence. Shooting in digital for the first time, Denis wrings harrowing performances from a strong ensemble cast, carefully avoiding lurid melodrama.

Bastards

Driven by knockout performances from Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz, CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA is a highly atmospheric behind-the-scenes psychodrama written and directed by Olivier Assayas with a knowing nod to Fassbinder. Binoche plays a superstar actress sequestered on a remote alpine retreat while she weighs up an offer to revive one of her career-making stage plays—this time in the older female role. Stewart co-stars as the personal assistant who works as the diva’s counselor, confidante and sometime sparring partner. Cast and crew won multiple prizes, including a César for Stewart, the first female American to earn the honor.

Clouds of Sils Maria

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

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

Ari takes us through her process for THE WONDER (2022), from initial meetings with director Sebastián Lelio and rigorous script-based preparation to the painterly details—the shine and topography of a wall, long-lens shots in vast panoramas, the precise diffusion of light through a window—that set her work apart.

The Scene: THE WONDER

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

How do you choreograph a stop-motion sex scene? To calibrate the emotional and technical aspects of the deed, ANOMALISA director Duke Johnson turned to professional sex workers, whose rehearsals mapped out precise sequencing and accidental gestures that felt authentic to life.

The Scene: ANOMALISA

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

Despite his discomfort discussing his own work, James opens up about one of the many dinner scenes in his 2022 film ARMAGEDDON TIME. “So much life happens around a dinner or lunch table,” he observes. “I love that the actor is able to dive into the scene. To me, that’s beautiful. To me, that’s what the medium’s about.”

The Scene: ARMAGEDDON TIME

“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

Inspired by a Japanese romantic pop ballad, director Kōji Fukada’s poignant love-triangle drama is a beautifully observed meditation on hidden family tensions, old flames and divided loyalties. Married couple Taeko (Fumino Kimura) and Jirō (Kento Nagayama) share an outwardly idyllic life in a sunny apartment with son Keita (Tetta Shimada). But their placid facade of happiness is shattered by the sudden reappearance of Taeko’s troubled first husband, Park (Atom Sunada), who is now deaf, sick and homeless. A quietly devastating slow-motion tragedy told with elegant restraint, LOVE LIFE is a master class in hushed beauty.

Love Life

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

Best known for his hypnotic collage documentary KOYAANISQATSI (1982) and its sequels, essay-film maverick Godfrey Reggio pushes his experimental style to new heights with this fable-like rumination on the perils of our current techno-dystopian age. Peppered with droll homages to Luis Buñuel, Georges Méliès and Stanley Kubrick, ONCE WITHIN A TIME plots a wordless, free-form narrative through multiple dazzling visual backdrops, from the Garden of Eden to the contemporary digital mediascape. Graced with a lustrous score by regular Reggio collaborator Philip Glass, plus the bold casting of boxer Mike Tyson as part of its colorful ensemble cast, this is a surreal, richly inventive fairy tale.

Once Within a Time

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

After honing his high-gloss visual style shooting music videos for Pearl Jam and U2, director Mark Pellington made his debut feature with this nostalgic adaptation of Dan Wakefield’s 1970 novel about two young Korean War veterans looking for sex, romance and adventure in conservative 1950s Indiana. Still relatively unknown at the time, Ben Affleck is boyishly charming here as a reformed high-school jock, while Jeremy Davis shines as his sensitive artist buddy. Pellington finds fresh, funny, tender angles on familiar coming-of-age material, aided by a stellar cast which also features Rachel Weisz, Rose McGowan and Nick Offerman.

Going All the Way

Actor, writer and director Tom Noonan adapted his own stage play into this bleakly funny two-hander about the dating landscape, which won the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance. Noonan also co-stars opposite Karen Sillas, playing office co-workers sharing a tentative romantic connection. Unfolding almost in real time, WHAT HAPPENED WAS… gradually exposes the pair’s quiet desperation and tragicomic character flaws via subtle tonal shifts and tense revelations. Absurdist glumcore supremo Charlie Kaufman was one of the film’s early champions, later casting Noonan in his own SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008) and ANOMALISA (2015).

What Happened Was...

John Malkovich pushes his clownish side to the max in COLOR ME KUBRICK, savoring every camp flourish and absurdly fake accent as real-life con man Alan Conway, who passed himself off as film director Stanley Kubrick for several years. Bouncing around the theaters and restaurants of London, Conway used his notional fame as the reclusive filmmaking legend to score free meals, celebrity meetings and even sexual favors. Based on a true story but laced with winking meta-comic mischief, this romp was directed by Brian W. Cook and scripted by Anthony Frewin, both former assistants to the real Kubrick.

Color Me Kubrick

Irish director Neil Jordan worked with feted English fantasy author Angela Carter on this visually ravishing anthology of horror-tinged gothic yarns, which revisit “Little Red Riding Hood” and other familiar fairy tales through an erotically charged, post-Freudian, feminist-informed lens. Angela Lansbury co-stars as a grandmother figure whose bedtime stories are seductive warnings about the dangerous allure of beastly, hairy men. Launching the career of teenage screen novice Sarah Patterson, Jordan’s ambitious reworking of literary tropes about haunted forests and lycanthropic lust features lavish production design by Anton Furst, who later worked on Tim Burton’s BATMAN.

The Company of Wolves

One of the few Warhol superstars to achieve genuine stardom beyond their allotted 15 minutes, Candy Darling was an early trans icon, born James Slattery in Forest Hills, Queens,  before reinventing herself as a living artwork in the shape of a classic Hollywood blonde bombshell. James Rasin’s engrossing, sympathetic documentary chronicles Candy’s glamorous but tragically short life story using archive footage and a stellar cast list of interviewees including John Waters, Holly Woodlawn, Fran Lebowitz and Paul Morrissey. Darling’s diary entries are voiced by Chloë Sevigny, with Patton Oswalt standing in for both Warhol and Truman Capote.

Beautiful Darling

Director James Crump restores a pioneering fashion-world icon to his rightful place in the pantheon in this stylish, celebratory documentary. A groundbreaking illustrator, stylist and pansexual party animal whose career straddled New York and Paris in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Puerto Rico–born Lopez mixed with a cool celebrity crowd including Jessica Lange, Grace Jones, Yves Saint Laurent, Jerry Hall, Karl Lagerfeld and Andy Warhol. Between seductive flashbacks to this lost disco demi-monde, Crump’s elegantly dressed film also explores how Lopez challenged latent racism in the fashion industry before his untimely AIDS-related death in 1987.

Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco

Immortalized in Alek Keshishian’s hugely successful documentary MADONNA: TRUTH OR DARE (1991), the blockbuster Blond Ambition tour catapulted seven young dancers from New York’s “vogueing” underground into the superstar limelight. With STRIKE A POSE, co-directors Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan hit upon the inspired notion to revisit these performers 25 years later, chronicling how their lives subsequently played out. There is triumph and tragedy here, notably the lethal legacy of HIV-AIDS, plus mixed feelings toward Madonna, who appears only in archive footage. But Gould and Zwaan mostly draw moving life lessons from their bittersweet study of overnight fame, survival and queer liberation.

Strike a Pose

A celebration of emotionally intense, politically astute American cinema, BY SIDNEY LUMET offers a superb overview of the late director’s long life and prolific career, narrated by the man himself. Rooted in a lengthy interview recorded in 2008, three years before Lumet’s death, Nancy Buirski’s documentary covers his family history, early brushes with Yiddish theater, and overseas military service alongside his huge canon of groundbreaking TV dramas and classic films including 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975), NETWORK (1976), THE VERDICT (1982) and more. Martin Scorsese is credited as special advisor to Buirski’s engaging, discursive documentary.

By Sidney Lumet

An archetypally fearsome queen of fashion magazines, Diana Vreeland’s influential tenure at HARPER’S BAZAAR, VOGUE and the Metropolitan Museum of Art spanned five decades of couture revolutions, parties and celebrities. Co-directed by Vreeland’s granddaughter-in-law Lisa Immordino Vreeland, in partnership with Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Frédéric Tcheng, DIANA VREELAND: THE EYE HAS TO TRAVEL is a freewheeling, gossipy, highly entertaining whirl through the intersecting worlds of fashion, art and fame. It features interview insights old and new from Anjelica Huston, Richard Avedon, Manolo Blahnik, Ali MacGraw and many more. Vreeland herself appears in extensive archive clips, a magisterial figure always keen to share her spiky, eminently quotable opinions.

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel

“It was obvious from his work that he’s somebody who loves women,” says Sophie of the fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez, whose work harnessed the glamour and freedom of 1970s New York to transform his celebrity subjects into characters. James Crump’s documentary about Lopez is “just beautifully done and the music’s great and it just takes you right back there.”

Sophie de Rakoff on Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco (2017)

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)

Desperate to see FLASHDANCE when it was released, Sophie and her girlfriends bunked off school to watch it in theaters. “There was such an energy to that movie at that moment in time for my generation,” she recalls. “It’s so much more than just the cutoff sweatshirt. I was like, Oh my God, this is America.”

Sophie de Rakoff on Flashdance (1983)

“Oh my God, what is this?” Sophie exclaimed after her first viewing of Jonathan Demme’s SOMETHING WILD. She was transfixed by the film’s manic joyride: “I just loved it, loved her, loved him, loved the music, loved the costumes, loved Ray Liotta. And Melanie Griffith is so gorgeous.”

Sophie de Rakoff on Something Wild (1986)

Tapping into her English roots, Sophie reflects on the darkly comic, “very British cult film” WITHNAIL & I. “If you grew up in England, you understand what it’s like to go on a holiday and end up somewhere and there’s nothing but cows and mud and it’s just complete misery.”

Sophie de Rakoff on Withnail and I (1987)

Sophie reflects on the now iconic costume design of LEGALLY BLONDE, and how she transformed Reese Witherspoon into Elle Woods—using a lot of pink, naturally. Citing photography as her main inspiration, Sophie’s process references her collection of art books and photographers who tell stories within a still image, explaining how she translates those narratives to the screen.

Sophie de Rakoff on Process

Sophie is joined by fellow costume designer Christine Wada (BRIDESMAIDS, LOKI) as they shop together at a vintage consignment shop and swap stories on fashioning films and defining the look of characters. “When you watch the actor actually find their character in the fitting room really it’s just…magical,” Christine says. Sophie agrees: “It's magical.”

Conversations on Craft with Christine Wada and Sophie de Rakoff

Kimberly describes the sensual, immersive world of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN. “It’s very much in tune with the human body,” she says. “You feel that it’s a continuation of your own agency and curiosity and desire.”

Kimberly Peirce on Y tu mamá también (2001)

Kimberly was spellbound by the cinematography and storytelling in Wong Kar-wai’s aching account of a turbulent romance. “I think it was the first time I had seen a classically shot, beautifully told male-on-male film, with male desire,” she says.

Kimberly Peirce on Happy Together (1997)

Kimberly connected with Gus Van Sant’s directorial debut for its raw and real depiction of queerness, encountering the film at a pivotal junction in her personal life.

Kimberly Peirce on Mala Noche (1986)

COMING HOME’s “down-to-the-core” depiction of the Vietnam War’s domestic aftermath served as a model for some of Kimberly’s own directing choices.

Kimberly Peirce on Coming Home (1978)

Studying with legendary editor Ralph Rosenblum, Kimberly learned how the brilliant structure of ANNIE HALL came into being, with pivotal moments landing “like needle drops on an album.”

Kimberly Peirce on Annie Hall (1977)

Kimberly explains why she considers George Stevens’s class drama starring Elizabeth Taylor “a perfect movie.”

Kimberly Peirce on A Place in the Sun (1951)

Kimberly talks about how Federico Fellini’s surrealist classic inspired her to become a director, citing Marcello Mastroianni’s rakishly charming protagonist as a personal revelation: “If I could’ve been Marcello, that would’ve been my alter ego.”

Kimberly Peirce on 8 1/2 (1963)

François Truffaut’s giddy French New Wave love triangle dispenses with convention and races toward the new. Watching it, Kimberly says, “you feel like you’re defining the future of what love can be.”

Kimberly Peirce on Jules and Jim (1962)

An ahead-of-its-time film that captures Billy Wilder “at his best,” SOME LIKE IT HOT contains some of Kimberly’s favorite performances and cinematic moments. “The sequence in the train, I could watch that on my deathbed,” she says. “Or any bed.”

Kimberly Peirce on Some Like It Hot (1959)

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

Scoring huge transatlantic success in the 1970s, British blues-rock supergroup Bad Company once shared a manager, a record label and a debauched reputation with Led Zeppelin. Narrated by the surviving band members, plus famous friends including Queen guitarist Brian May, director Jon Brewer’s career-spanning documentary is fairly straight but greatly entertaining. Going beyond banal promotional exercise, it gives appropriate space to the dumb excesses, overblown egos and disastrous business decisions alongside the band’s platinum-selling, stadium-filling triumphs.

Bad Company: The Official Authorised 40th Anniversary Documentary

Veteran Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán adds a celestial dimension to familiar thematic concerns in this majestic documentary, which explores Chile’s Atacama Desert, globally famous as one of Earth’s best stargazing sites but also infamous as the clandestine burial ground for thousands of dissidents murdered by Augusto Pinochet’s authoritarian regime. Guzmán draws a powerful analogy between these two groups, interviewing astronomers who scan the heavens for cosmic clues alongside family members grimly combing the desert for human remains. Couched in ravishing visuals and superlative sound design, this award-winning film offers an inspired fusion of the personal and political.

Nostalgia for the Light

A treat for connoisseurs and scholars of American art-house cinema, director Gabe Klinger’s documentary is a freewheeling, discursive, close-up portrait of two very different filmmakers: the stylistically promiscuous Texan auteur Richard Linklater and the older, more experimental, more formally austere Wisconsin native James Benning. Friends and mutual admirers for decades, the pair spend a relaxed week together exploring their shared interests and obsessions, from baseball to deconstructing time onscreen. Klinger deploys archive stills and vintage footage to great effect, teasing out both the common ground and contrasts between these two unique artists.

Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater

Originally conceived as a straight behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Terry Gilliam’s historical epic THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE, this real-life disaster movie from directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe took on a life of its own when the ill-starred production collapsed barely a week into its Spanish shoot. Plagued by torrential rainstorms, unfinished sets and the worsening health problems of costar Jean Rochefort, Gilliam’s $32 million fantasy yarn folded like a house of cards. After years of legal wrangling, he finally got to finish his Quixote movie in 2018, but this cautionary backstage saga is arguably the better film.

Lost in La Mancha

Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme’s LE JOLI MAI heavily inspired Chai on her first film, A NORMAL LIFE. “You get the sense of the end of a colonial power that’s very deep and very strong,” she says. “LE JOLI MAI is a really interesting examination of how you come to terms with a violent past.”

Le joli mai

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

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

The final film by cult Italian director Valerio Zurlini is a hauntingly beautiful adaptation of Dino Buzzati’s 1940 novel of the same name, published in English as THE TARTAR STEPPE. Zurlini’s favorite leading man Jacques Perrin plays a young lieutenant posted to a remote fortress on the far fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his life gradually consumed by hollow military ritual as he awaits attack by an invisible enemy. Elegantly crafted, with visual allusions to the painter Giorgio de Chirico and a mournful Ennio Morricone score, this sumptuous existential parable costars Max von Sydow and Vittorio Gassman.

The Desert of the Tartars

Filmed in a single bravura 90-minute Steadicam shot, director Alexander Sokurov’s sumptuous audiovisual symphony takes a time-traveling journey through 33 rooms of the magnificent Winter Palace of the Russian State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. As well as serving as the unnamed ghostly narrator, Sokurov restages events across three centuries of Russian history, including a theater rehearsal for Catherine the Great, a lavish ball hosted by Tsar Nicholas II, Stalin-era paranoia and the World War II Siege of Leningrad. Epic in scale and ambition, RUSSIAN ARK features 2,000 actors and three live orchestras. Sokurov and his cinematographer Tilman Büttner captured this technically dazzling real-time pageant on the last of four possible attempts.

Russian Ark

Set across the city’s arrondissements and directed by auteurs including Alfonso Cuarón, the Coen brothers and Gus Van Sant, these 18 vignettes explore love in all its forms: platonic, romantic, unrequited—even vampiric. With a stellar cast (including Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi and Fanny Ardant) and charming locations, this installment of French producer Emmanuel Benbihy’s Cities of Love anthology series is as tender and beguiling as love itself.

Paris, je t'aime

István Szabó’s LOVEFILM was and remains revolutionary for its time: a love story that spans decades, about a pair of childhood friends in Hungary who are reunited as adults in Paris. The result is tender, sharp and political: It’s easy to see both Szabó’s European New Wave influences and his impact on future directors like Paweł Pawlikowski. LOVEFILM is equal parts intellectual and artful, brimming with passion and simmering with grief.

Lovefilm

An elegant and quiet chamber piece about a woman and her dog trying to land on their feet in small-town Oregon, Reichardt’s film is neither tragic nor exploitative, but rather methodical and heartrending as Wendy (a steely Michelle Williams) strives against a system designed for her to lose every time. This film marks the first of several moving collaborations between Williams and Reichardt, as well as the director’s second script co-written with frequent screenwriting partner Jonathan Raymond.

Wendy and Lucy

South Korean director and former government culture and tourism minister Lee Chang-dong scored major international kudos with this tense, cryptic and highly atmospheric thriller. Expanded from Haruki Murakami’s short story BARN BURNING, with nods to the William Faulkner story of the same name, the film dissects a tortuous love triangle between aspiring writer Jong-su (Ah-in Yoo), his former childhood crush Hae-mi (Jong-seo Jeoun), and her sociopathic playboy lover, Ben (Steven Yeun). Lee’s nerve-jangling study in suspense and unspoken class warfare won multiple festival prizes and became the first South Korean film ever to be shortlisted for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Burning

French writer-director Maïwenn Le Besco weaves echoes from her own relationship history into this emotionally raw drama, chronicling a tempestuous 10-year marriage between sassy lawyer Tony (Emmanuelle Bercot) and charismatic restaurateur Georgio (Vincent Cassel). With Parisian chic, this crash-and-burn love story puts a contemporary spin on classic French cinema ingredients, enhanced by explosive performances, especially from Bercot, who won a Best Actress prize at Cannes.

My King

Danish director, author and visual artist Jørgen Leth’s compact masterpiece is a gently surreal, satirical commentary on the human condition. Meticulously framed in crisp monochrome shots, this 13-minute gem is pitched as a quasi-anthropological snapshot of a young couple performing everyday tasks in a blank interior space. The film enjoyed a profile boost when fellow Dane Lars von Trier challenged Leth to shoot multiple remakes for their experimental collaboration THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS (2003).

The Perfect Human

Hungry to escape narrow horizons and zero-option lives, a gang of teenage skateboarders become fatefully entangled with stolen drugs and female mobsters in director Steven Caple Jr.’s fast-paced debut feature, a gritty crime thriller set on the mean streets of Cleveland. Big-screen novice Jorge Lendeborg Jr. makes an engaging young antihero, aided by a classy supporting cast including THE WIRE veteran Michael Kenneth Williams. An impressively starry soundtrack features one of the film’s producer, hip-hop legend Nas, plus Erykah Badu and Colson Baker, aka Machine Gun Kelly, both of whom also play small roles.

The Land

When a famed fisherman vanishes, the townsfolk of a Galician seaside village become catatonic. Composed mostly in lengthy static shots of single characters staring into the abyss, the film depicts their whispering voice-overs alternately blaming the disappearance on witches, a local sea monster and finally, shrouded apparitions. Could this be an apocalyptic curse, or a portent of environmental disaster? Director Lois Patiño casts a spell with oceanic sound design and mythic landscape. 

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Directed By Women

Women We Admire

Curator’s Choice: Ari Wegner

Agents of Change

We Love L.A.

Curator’s Choice: Kim Gordon

Original Series: The Scene

Guest Curator’s Choice: Oscilloscope Laboratories

Curator’s Choice: Sophie de Rakoff

Original Series: Sophie de Rakoff

Original Series: Kimberly Peirce

Selected Documentaries

All Titles