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

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

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

It was a flop on release, but Buster Keaton’s final feature for his independent production company remains a hugely ambitious spectacle, now rightly regarded as one of the deadpan silent-comedy legend’s greatest masterpieces. Keaton plays the foppish son of a Mississippi River steamboat operator who transforms into an unlikely action hero when a wealthy rival threatens his father’s livelihood. Directed by Charles Reisner, with uncredited help from Keaton, the film climaxes with a dazzling cyclone sequence featuring the star’s most feted and much-quoted stunt. 

Steamboat Bill, Jr.

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

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

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

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

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

An ambitious long-term experiment that paid off handsomely, Texan writer-director Richard Linklater’s formally bold coming-of-age drama was filmed in small installments across 12 years, with key cast members growing from children to adults across the span of the shoot. Just 7 when filming began, Ellar Coltrane is a real discovery as Mason Evans Jr., a wide-eyed boy navigating the eventful emotional journey from first grade to college. Patricia Arquette gives a richly detailed, Oscar-winning performance as Mason’s mother, while Linklater regular Ethan Hawke radiates soulful authenticity as his flawed but loving dad. Tender, bittersweet and beautifully observed, BOYHOOD is a Great American Novel onscreen.

Boyhood

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

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

Lost in limbo for years, Charles Burnett’s sophomore feature was only completed after the trailblazing indie director earned belated acclaim for his classic debut KILLER OF SHEEP (1978). Once again shot around South Central Los Angeles with a nonprofessional cast, including several members of the director’s family, MY BROTHER’S WEDDING stars Everette Silas as Pierce Mundy, a humble dry cleaning worker whose loyalties are sorely tested when his brother, Wendell (Monte Easter), announces plans to marry his haughty lawyer girlfriend. Despite limited resources, Burnett and his team deliver a sophisticated dissection of how class, race and family ties intersect.

My Brother's Wedding

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

Once you adjust to its purposely languid slow-cinema rhythm, this monumental love-triangle drama from Mexican writer-director Carlos Reygadas delivers an achingly beautiful, quietly devastating story of tortured love and faith in crisis. SILENT LIGHT takes place in contemporary Mexico among a devout rural community of Mennonites who speak an old Low German dialect. Cornelio Wall plays Johan, a hardworking farmer tragically torn between his wife, Esther (played by novelist Miriam Toews), and his lover, Marianne (Maria Pankratz). Reygadas uses nonprofessional actors and painterly landscapes to powerful effect, crafting a prizewinning epic to rank alongside Old Masters like Dreyer, Tarkovsky and Malick.

Silent Light

Taking a counterintuitive approach to legendary literary and screen icons, Catalan “slow cinema” director Albert Serra’s offbeat period drama engineers an unlikely encounter between Casanova and Dracula, only to depict their notorious carnal appetites as pitiful and sleazy rather than dangerously irresistible. Aging libertine Casanova (Vicenç Altaió) and needy, impotent Dracula (Eliseu Huertas) compete to seduce the daughters of a devout farmer (Xavier Pau) in the Carpathian mountains. But the wily young women prove far more interested in playing these pompous predators off each other in a bid to subvert oppressive patriarchal rules in Serra’s droll and deadpan reimagining.

Story of My Death

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

Chronicling the ominously tense relationship between a mother and son, which builds inexorably from subtle mind games to homicidal violence, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s third feature is a riveting adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s emotionally wrenching hit novel. Tilda Swinton gives an intense, award-winning performance as long-suffering mother Eva, while Ezra Miller radiates diabolical charisma as the teen version of her sociopathic son, Kevin. Ramsay’s deft use of flashbacks and nonlinear structure preserves Shriver’s devastating final twist, but this timely thriller is less a suspense-driven exercise than a slow-burn psychological horror movie that taps into every parent’s worst nightmare.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Feted for his examinations of public figures at historic junctions (SPENCER, JACKIE, NERUDA), Chilean writer-director Pablo Larraín explores another kind of reckoning in THE CLUB. A remote coastal town hosts a small community of disgraced Catholic priests, most with secret pedophilic pasts. Like some clerical branch of the witness-protection program, these exiled misfits appear relatively content until the arrival of two outsiders trigger a series of violent ruptures. Shot in stylishly murky colors by Larraín’s regular cinematographer, Sergio Armstrong, this purgatorial parable won international acclaim and the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival.

The Club

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

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...

“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)

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 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)

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

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

Bursting with vibrant color, visual poetry and lust for life, Andrea Arnold’s emotionally charged portrait of a rebellious teenage girl growing up in a poor, single-parent family is refreshingly devoid of the monochrome misery that defines much British social-realist cinema. Newcomer Katie Jarvis makes her riveting acting debut as 15-year-old Mia, an aspiring dancer who develops an illicit crush on her mother’s shifty new boyfriend, Connor, played by a magnetic Michael Fassbender. Arnold’s prizewinning depiction of underclass life is no sanitized fantasy, but it does show how hope, defiance and beauty can thrive even in the midst of poverty and strife.

Fish Tank

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 deliciously dark coming-of-age comedy that milks maximum ironic humor from themes of teen suicide and classroom mass murder, director Michael Lehmann’s bold debut feature stars 16-year-old Winona Ryder as the high-school outcast caught between Kim Walker’s lethally spiteful mean-girl clique and Christian Slater’s homicidal bad-boy rebel. Despite a commercially lukewarm release, this misanthropic masterpiece has since established itself as an evergreen 1980s classic, inspiring a TV spin-off and hit stage musical.

Heathers

Many filmmakers have found metaphors for sexual awakening in werewolf mythology, but director John Fawcett’s terrific Canadian horror comedy reimagines familiar genre tropes with spiky feminist claws and subversively dark humor. Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins play teenage sisters whose dull suburban existence is suddenly shattered when they begin reacting very oddly to the full moon, with menstruation and lycanthropy converging to very bloody effect. Karen Walton’s sharp-witted screenplay elevates GINGER SNAPS way beyond creature-feature trappings.

Ginger Snaps

A young Michael Redgrave lurks among the colorful background chorus of sinister strangers, undercover spies and Nazis in one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best-loved British productions. Margaret Lockwood is the only passenger who suspects foul play after a fellow traveler goes missing from a train crossing Europe on the brink of World War II. The witty blend of caper comedy and mystery thriller secured the director an invitation from producer David O. Selznick to work in Hollywood, where Hitch made many more classics.

The Lady Vanishes

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

The official debut feature of revered cult director Mario Bava is a landmark work of Italian genre cinema. English-born scream queen Barbara Steele plays dual roles, as Asa Vajda, a decadent 17th-century satanic-leaning princess condemned to a gruesomely sadistic death, and Katia Vajda, the distant ancestor whom Asa returns to torment centuries later. Former cinematographer Bava’s dynamic camerawork and striking monochrome visuals elevate this gothic shocker to high art, laying the foundations for the luridly eroticized Euro-horror giallo genre.

Black Sunday

Based on Norwegian author Knut Hamsun’s semi-autobiographical 1890 novel of the same name, Danish writer-director Henning Carlsen’s HUNGER is a late-19th-century story that feels bracingly modern in its riveting first-person depiction of existential angst and urban psychosis. Swedish actor Per Oscarsson won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his role as an aspiring young writer who stubbornly embraces his romanticized self-image as a starving artist, drifting around Oslo assailed by hallucinatory visions and unsettling encounters. It’s filmed in luminous monochrome with fluid camerawork that nods to the French New Wave.

Hunger (1966)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rüdiger Suchsland’s essay film borrows its title and thesis from Siegfried Kracauer’s seminal 1947 study of Weimar-era cinema. It charts the rise of the Third Reich in Germany through clues buried in milestone Expressionist movies by Robert Reinert, Robert Wiene and Fritz Lang. More than 70 years later, Suchsland makes a compelling case for Kracauer’s contentious post-Freudian argument, aided by beautifully restored archive clips and scholarly commentary from German cinema heavyweights including Volker Schlöndorff and Fatih Akin.

From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the Masses

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

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

Three small-town drinking buddies search for a stolen lottery ticket with a huge prize attached in writer-director Paul Negoescu’s bittersweet Romanian comedy. Co-stars Dorian Boguță, Dragos Bucur and Alexandru Papadopol not only play the leads but also produced the film through their acting school, offering scene-stealing cameos to dozens of their students. Droll and charming, it’s a refreshingly sunny road movie from a cinematic nation more typically associated with bleak social realism.

Two Lottery Tickets

You never totally know what you’ll get with a Quentin Dupieux film. The French director—who also makes music as Mr. Oizo—is known for his signature absurdist work, ranging from a murderous tire (Rubber) to a jacket-loving psychopath (Deerskin) and so much in between. Here, Dupieux sets his murder mystery inside a police station and rarely leaves, exposing the bureaucratic minutiae and laughable (in)competency of his characters, always in over their heads.

Keep an Eye Out

Djibril Diop Mambéty only completed two full-length features in his short life; both are stylish, darkly satirical gems. Walking a tightrope between farce and tragedy, HYENAS transposes Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1956 drama The Visit to modern-day Senegal, adding a postcolonial dimension to the cautionary critique of greed and corruption. Ami Diakhate plays a wealthy but vengeful woman who returns to her home village promising riches to its inhabitants in return for killing the storekeeper (Mansour Diouf) who left her to marry another woman.

Hyenas

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. 

Red Moon Tide

Cult British auteur director Peter Strickland launched his career with Katalin Varga, a broodingly atmospheric revenge thriller set in Romania’s remote Hungarian-speaking regions. Hilda Péter radiates quietly murderous intensity as the eponymous heroine who flees her home village with her young son, Orbán (Norbert Tankó), for a lethal reckoning with the men who once wronged her. Shooting in a language he barely speaks, on a tiny budget funded entirely by a modest family legacy, Strickland proves an impressively resourceful master of suspense.

Katalin Varga

The passing of time has lent extra historical significance to this racy British melodrama, a fascinating early example of queer social-realist cinema. Based on a 1961 novel by Gillian Freeman, who also penned the screenplay, THE LEATHER BOYS stars Colin Campbell as Reggie, a young working-class South Londoner torn between his sexless marriage to Dot (Rita Tushingham) and his deepening attraction to a gay biker friend, Pete (Dudley Sutton). Director Sidney J. Furie’s kitchen-sink love-triangle drama is coy by modern standards, sanitizing the novel’s more explicit same-sex love story, but it still stands up as a revealing cult curio from a more closeted age.

The Leather Boys

Switching from documentary to narrative feature for the first time, award-winning director Ondi Timoner turns her probing eye on cult photographer and transgressive queer icon Robert Mapplethorpe in this frank, intimate biopic. British screen star Matt Smith captures the late art-world rebel’s volatile charisma, while Marianne Rendón radiates febrile proto-punk energy as his sometime muse Patti Smith. Working with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation’s support, Timoner is able to punctuate grungy flashbacks to the Chelsea Hotel’s boho heyday with striking real-life examples of his controversial, daringly homoerotic work.

Mapplethorpe

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

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

An early video-collage work by San Francisco-based author, campaigner and queer film historian Jenni Olson, HOMO PROMO is both great fun and a fascinating piece of pop-culture scholarship. Olson’s fast-moving compilation gathers the trailers for dozens of gay-themed movies from 1956 through the 1980s, plotting a chronological overview of how studios and filmmakers have worked with censorship, taboo topics and changing social attitudes over the decades. With classic titles including THE CHILDREN’S HOUR (1961), MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969) and CRUISING (1980), the juicy trailer selection covers the full LGBTQ+ rainbow from lurid to lyrical, coy to camp, famous to infamous.

Homo Promo

Director Reiner Holzemer’s resourceful documentary celebrates the life and work of infamously media-shy Belgian fashion designer Martin Margiela, who only appears onscreen here in the form of voice-over and hands. Holzemer meticulously extracts as much information as possible on Margiela’s early life, inspirational spell as an assistant to Jean Paul Gaultier, uncompromising break-out success, and surprise retirement from the industry to become a visual artist. His outlandish designs and unorthodox catwalk shows, which often featured found objects and amateur models recruited via street casting, make MARTIN MARGIELA: IN HIS OWN WORDS a highly engaging film even for total high-fashion agnostics.

Martin Margiela: In His Own Words

In the 1960s, the exceptional winning streak of Nichibo Kaizuka, a volleyball team of Japanese textile workers, sparked rumors of the supernatural. French director Julien Faraut’s documentary snaps into the team’s routines to show that the women’s success came not through bubbling cauldrons but through discipline, rigor and talent. Mixing archival footage and anime, it captures Japan’s response to World War II and the team’s role in rebuilding national prestige on the global stage.

The Witches of the Orient

Following his widely feted RAMS (2015), filmmaker Grímur Hákonarson returned to a similarly elemental landscape, literally and emotionally, with this hard-edged David and Goliath story. Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir gives a fiercely committed performance as Inga, a grieving farmer in a remote corner of Iceland fighting the Mafia-like collective that controls the local farms. Beyond its prickly political message, THE COUNTY is a bleakly comic rumination on the soul-crushing futility of work itself.

The County

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

Symphonic in scale and tragicomic in feel, Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s monumental masterwork spans seven hours of screen time but is never less than hypnotically absorbing. Freely adapted from the 1985 novel by László Krasznahorkai, the opus is set in a purgatorial, rain-sodden farming village full of lost souls, petty criminals and fatalistic misfits. Filmed in gloriously grimy monochrome and extended tracking shots (some stretching up to 10 minutes) this bleak, beautiful epic is a visual feast. The dubious messianic figure of Irimiás is played by Tarr’s regular composer Mihály Vig, who also wrote the mournful, tango-inspired score.

Sátántangó

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

A lyrical coming-of-age drama spiced with fantasy interludes, Hungarian auteur István Szabó’s charming second feature takes place in postwar Budapest. Growing up fatherless, Takó (Dániel Erdély) dreams up romantic stories about his late dad’s heroic exploits, but the older Takó (András Bálint) reassesses his views on fatherhood and the fatherland following his relationship with a Jewish girl and involvement with the bloody Hungarian uprising of 1956. Handsomely shot by cinematographer Sándor Sára, Father is a meditation on grief, love and national memory.

Father

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

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

Set in Communist Poland in 1962, this emotionally devastating period drama considers the tragic secrets of postwar Polish history through the eyes of a trainee Catholic nun (Agata Trzebuchowska) and her hard-drinking libertine aunt (Agata Kulesza). Drawing on his Polish-Jewish ancestry, writer-director Paweł Pawlikowski invokes the minimalist cool of the French New Wave with monochrome cinematography and a knowingly retro 1.33:1 aspect ratio. An elegantly concise modern classic, IDA was the first Polish feature to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

In German video artist Julian Rosefeldt’s film, Cate Blanchett plays 13 characters reciting artistic manifestos on Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, Minimalism and more. Lest it all get too highbrow, the film reveals its humor in wry segments: Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist worldview delivered at a funeral; Claes Oldenburg’s Pop Art poetry as a pre-meal grace. With 100 years of artistic directives condensed into 100 minutes, you can’t hope to make sense of it all. Not on your first watch, anyway.

Manifesto

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

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

The Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, drew on their personal wartime childhood memories to make this lyrical Cannes prizewinner. Over a bright summer night in rural Italy, with U.S. Army liberators closing in, a group of citizens from a small Italian town wander the countryside, trying to avoid retreating Nazi occupiers and their brutal fascist allies. Elevated by hints of magical realism despite its darker themes, THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS boasts painterly visuals by ace lensman Franco Di Giacomo, a former Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci collaborator who later shot IL POSTINO (1994).

The Night of the Shooting Stars

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

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

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

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

At God’s Promise, a camp for “gender-confused” teens, Cameron (Chloë Grace Moretz) learns that binaries rule: man and woman, husband and wife, heaven and hell. Between sessions with the frightening Dr. Marsh (Jennifer Ehle) and Reverend Rick (John Gallagher Jr.), Cameron seeks comfort in a newfound family. A cautionary tale set amid the culture wars, director Desiree Akhavan’s film finds drama in small moments, while the most devastating ones occur offscreen.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post

With this tender, unsensational exploration of hot-button trans and gender issues, French documentarian Sébastien Lifshitz paints a deeply compassionate portrait of 7-year-old Sasha, who was assigned male at birth but identifies as a girl. Maintaining a discreet and nonjudgmental tone, Lifshitz gets revealingly close to his subject and her family, meticulously recording her meetings with medical professionals, her challenges at school, and the conflicted emotions of her loving parents. Clothed in ravishing widescreen cinematography, LITTLE GIRL (PETITE FILLE) couches a heartwarming story in richly hued, lyrical visuals.

Little Girl

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

In 1560, an expedition of Spanish conquistadors wends its way through the Peruvian jungle in search of El Dorado, the lost city of gold. What could go wrong? Werner Herzog’s landmark work on hubris, starring Klaus Kinski (at his most megalomaniacal), remains a staggering achievement: As the group splinters in the face of fevers, famine, natives, mutiny and madness, they’re stripped of their colonialist ambitions and self-conception as a civilizing force. In a notorious case of life imitating art, the production was imperiled from the outset by the hellacious conditions in the Amazon Basin, with Kinski and Herzog reportedly locked in a battle of egos to rival those on the screen. The hypnotic score by Krautrock pioneers Popol Vuh amplifies an ambience of mythic devastation.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

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. 

Watch

Agents of Change

Most Loved Films

Curator’s Choice: Kim Gordon

Original Series: The Scene

Curator’s Choice: Sebastián Lelio

Guest Curator’s Choice: Oscilloscope Laboratories

Original Series: Sophie de Rakoff

Curator’s Choice: Pablo Larraín

Curator’s Choice: Duke Johnson

Selected Documentaries

All Titles