Holy Spider
Dir. Ali Abbasi
As a crime thriller, Holy Spider is taut and terrifying, a modern noir that manages to unnerve despite the familiar…
Pacifiction
Dir. Albert Serra
It doesn’t feel quite right to call Pacifiction a political thriller — at 2 hours 45 minutes and with an…
La Belle Noiseuse
Dir. Jacques Rivette
When it comes to work, most apply to a job, take a 9-5 role for some decades, and then retire…
Bacurau
Dir. Juliano Dornelles & Kleber Mendonça Filho
This incredibly creative and unique movie is set in a fictional small town in the Brazilian Backcountry. It has a…
The Straight Story
A family-friendly, Disney-backed movie is not something you’d expect from cinema’s surrealist master, but The Straight Story marks a surprisingly…
A Touch of Sin
Dir. Jia Zhangke
“It is better to live miserable than to die happy,” or so says one of the characters in Jia Zhangke’s…
The City of Lost Children
Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro
The optimism in the turn of the century led to quirky children’s fantasy adventures in the 90s and early aughts,…
The Consequences of Love
Dir. Paolo Sorrentino
What exactly are The Consequences of Love? At first glance, this seemingly mundane drama offers its audience an Italian loner…
The Sweet Hereafter
Dir. Atom Egoyan
The Sweet Hereafter is the kind of movie that feels very different from the one you might imagine when reading…
Flowers of Shanghai
Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien
Written like a stage play, directed like the viewer is a fly on the wall, and shot with a love…
Possession
Dir. Andrzej Żuławski
Created during his divorce and his exile from his native then-communist Poland, Possession is Andrzej Żuławski’s best known feature. It’s…
Land and Freedom
Dir. Ken Loach
Stereotypically made to look like one-note villains in many other films, the kinds of characters who lead Land and Freedom…
Funny Games
Dir. Michael Haneke
See, usually, when American violence in media is critiqued, it’s usually through analytic studies or overly exaggerated lectures stirring moral…
Certified Copy
Dir. Abbas Kiarostami
Certified Copy starts straightforward enough as it follows an unnamed shopkeeper (Juliette Binoche) and a writer (William Shimell) taking a…
American Honey
Dir. Andrea Arnold & 安德里亚·阿诺德
British filmmaker extraordinaire Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank) draws the perfect portrait of two young American drifters who fall in love.…
Waltz with Bashir
Dir. Ari Folman
In Waltz with Bashir, director Ari Folman grapples with the trauma and dehumanization of war by examining the role he…
Two Lovers
Dir. James Gray
This is the most practical romantic movie I have seen though many would disagree with its ending. It’s a triangular love…
Only Lovers Left Alive
Dir. Jim Jarmusch
Jim Jarmusch’s latest film is the story of a pair of vampires, Adam and Eve (Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton),…
Ash Is Purest White
Dir. Jia Zhang-ke & Jia Zhangke
Jia Zhangke (who NPR critic John Powers once called “perhaps the most important filmmaker working in the world today”), directed…
Henry Fool
Dir. Hal Hartley
It’s easy to mistake Henry Fool for one of those stylish, aimless movies that only look smart but are, essentially,…
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
This is a really weird movie starring Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman. They play a wholesome and well-off couple where…
Broken Embraces
Dir. Pedro Almodóvar
Is there any other filmmaker more suited to the melodrama than Pedro Almodóvar? Broken Embraces holds many of the themes…
Enter the Void
Dir. Gaspar Noé
In this raw, psychedelic drama, an American drug dealer living in Tokyo with his sister is killed at a night…