Children of Paradise
Marcel Carné, 1945, 190 min

“Poetic realism reached sublime heights with Children of Paradise, widely considered one of the greatest French films of all time. This nimble depiction of nineteenth-century Paris’s theatrical demimonde, filmed during World War II, follows a mysterious woman (Arletty) loved by four different men (all based on historical figures): an actor, a criminal, a count, and, most poignantly, a mime (Jean-Louis Barrault, in a longing-suffused performance for the ages). With sensitivity and dramatic élan, director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert resurrect a world teeming with hucksters and aristocrats, thieves and courtesans, pimps and seers.” – Janus Films

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Rome, Open City
Roberto Rossellini, 1945, 103 min

“This was Roberto Rossellini's revelation, a harrowing drama about the Nazi occupation of Rome and the brave few who struggled against it. Though told with more melodramatic flair than the other films that would form this trilogy and starring some well-known actors – Aldo Fabrizi as a priest helping the partisan cause and Anna Magnani in her breakthrough role as the fiancée of a resistance member – Rome, Open City is a shockingly authentic experience, conceived and directed amid the ruin of World War II, with immediacy in every frame. Marking a watershed moment in Italian cinema, this galvanic work garnered awards around the globe and left the beginnings of a new film movement in its wake.” – Janus Films

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Rear Window
Alfred Hitchcock, 1954, 112 min

“An intriguing study of obsession, Rear Window tells the story of L. B. “Jeff” Jefferies (Stewart), a temporarily wheelchair-bound photographer who uses his convalescent time to spy on the tenants of other apartments on his block through his own “rear window.” Amid a growing suspicion that one of his neighbours has committed murder, he enlists his girlfriend (Kelly) and maid (Ritter) to gather evidence, with near-tragic results. Hitchcock’s creative use of camera angles, shot predominantly from Jefferies’s apartment window, draws viewers into the tantalizing world of voyeurism.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Letter Never Sent
Mikhail Kalatozov, 1959, 96 min

“The great Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov, known for his virtuosic, emotionally gripping films, perhaps never made a more visually astonishing one than Letter Never Sent. This absorbing tale of exploration and survival concerns the four members of a geological expedition, who are stranded in the bleak and unforgiving Siberian wilderness while on a mission to find diamonds. Luxuriating in wide-angle beauty and featuring one daring shot after another (the brilliant cinematography is by Kalatozov’s frequent collaborator Sergei Urusevsky), Letter Never Sent is a fascinating piece of cinematic history and a universal adventure of the highest order. – Janus Films

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Black Orpheus
Marcel Camus, 1959, 107 min

“Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. With its eye-popping photography and ravishing, epochal soundtrack, Black Orpheus was an international cultural event, and it kicked off the bossa nova craze that set hi-fis across America spinning.” – Janus Films

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Shoot the Pianist
François Truffaut, 1960, 81 min

“François Truffaut is drunk on the possibilities of cinema in this, his most playful film. Part thriller, part comedy, part tragedy, Shoot the Pianist relates the adventures of mild-mannered piano player Charlie (Charles Aznavour, in a triumph of hangdog deadpan) as he stumbles into the criminal underworld and a whirlwind love affair. Loaded with gags, guns, clowns, and thugs, this razor-sharp homage to the American gangster film is pure nouvelle vague.” – Janus Films

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The Leopard
Luchino Visconti, 1963, 187 min

"Visconti integrates a family history into a panoramic account of the Risorgimento; revolution informs the most intimate relationships between the aristocrat Fabrizio (Burt Lancaster), his radical nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon), and Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), whose marriage to Tancredi signals the symbolic merging of the classes. “Perhaps no film captures the Proustian aesthetic more firmly,” Warren Sonbert wrote. “Visconti’s camera visually caresses the passage of time, the shifting nuances among the adrift and split characters and the recording of specifics transcending to the universal. [...] The folly and grandeur of aristocratic dissolution, subsumed into the bourgeois ranks, never receives a pointed finger in this intricate investigation. No cut unless necessary and each gliding camera movement a reflection on the dramatic situation. CinemaScope allows freedom of choice, which not surprisingly is one of the major themes of this grand, classically constructed cinematic feast.”" – BAMPFA

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The Gospel According to Matthew
Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964, 138 min

"Pasolini’s disarmingly straightforward version of the life of Christ secured his reputation as a filmmaker, rather than simply a poet dabbling in cinema. Aiming to strip away the sanctimony typical of screen adaptations of the Gospels, Pasolini sought to recover the rough poetry of the original texts, pointedly omitting the “Saint” from his title to secularize Matthew. Pasolini’s Christ emerges as much a political revolutionary as a religious figure, addressing the problems of the poor and undermining the patriarchy of the traditional family. With a visual style heavily influenced by Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis (1950), the film contains a number of frontal, static shots that reveal Pasolini’s love for early Renaissance painting and point toward the radical classicism of his late films." – Harvard Film Archive

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Woman of the Dunes
Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964, 147 min

"The sands of time have not worn away the startling beauty of Woman in the Dunes, nor answered the fundamental questions of identity and commitment the film poses. A young widow lives in a pit-house and is fed by her neighbors; she is forced to constantly clear her pit of the sands that threaten to engulf the whole village. The villagers bring a passing entomologist, who has missed his bus home, to spend the night, and share her work and her bed – it seems, forever. Many scenes still haunt – the woman’s mysterious nocturnal labors, the man’s own Sisyphean attempts to escape as the community of sand people watch from on high. Who’s the insect now? “I’ve a job! I’m registered!” he protests, but the metamorphosis has already transpired. Hiroshi Teshigahara reverses the metaphor of the shifting sands of fate – here we have the shifting fates of sand, as in Beckett’s “Grain upon grain...”" – Judy Bloch

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Repulsion
Roman Polanski, 1965, 105 min

Roman Polanski followed up his international breakthrough Knife in the Water with this controversial, chilling tale of psychosis. Catherine Deneuve is Carol, a fragile, frigid young beauty cracking up in her London flat when left alone by her vacationing sister. She is soon haunted by spectres real and imagined, and her insanity grows to a violent, hysterical pitch. Thanks to its disturbing detail and Polanski’s adeptness at turning claustrophobic space into an emotional minefield, Repulsion is a surreal, mind-bending odyssey into personal horror, and it remains one of cinema’s most shocking psychological thrillers.

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Persona
Ingmar Bergman, 1966, 83 min

“Arguably Bergman’s most representative and iconic film, Persona is the pivot point between the director’s two great sixties trilogies (his crisis-of-faith trio and the island-set films with which he closed the decade), blending crucial elements of both into something spare, chilling and inimitable. Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson star as a traumatized actress and her caretaker, respectively, but are they really two different people at all? The most abstractly drawn of all Bergman narratives, Persona migrates the women from a nondescript hospital in an undisclosed location to a remote seaside cottage and back again, their initial nurse-patient dynamic deteriorating, flipping and finally exploding over the course of a fraught, dreamlike eighty-three minutes. Taking influence from the era’s avant-garde underground as well as from the modernist methods of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni, Bergman fashions an expressionistic surface that mirrors the mental landscapes of his two sparring heroines, juxtaposing meditative landscape shots against stuttering montage freak-outs and ambitious, sculptural uses of the human face.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Andrei Rublev
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966, 183 min

"Originally titled The Passion According to Andrei, Tarkovsky’s second feature remains a wholly original epic, a life of the medieval icon painter encompassing the full horror of history. The culminating vision of Rublev’s Trinity only emerges from the yoke of Tartar occupation, mystic rites, excommunications, and nearly unrelieved suffering. In attempting, as Tarkovsky told an interviewer, "to trace the road Rublev followed during the terrible years [in which] he lived," the film is besieged with lucid visions of violence and cruelty – a panorama worthy of Brueghel. The Goskino authorities found Tarkovsky’s hallucinatory staging of history sufficiently dangerous to shelve the film for five years." – Harvard Film Archive

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The Battle of Algiers
Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, 121 min

“One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafés, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents. Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them. Pontecorvo’s tour de force has astonishing relevance today.” – Janus Films

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Funeral Parade of Roses
Toshio Matsumoto, 1969, 105 min

"A carnivalesque melding of documentary verité and avant-garde psychedelia, Funeral Parade of Roses offers a shocking and ecstatic journey through the nocturnal underworld of Tokyo's Shinjuku neighborhood, following the strange misadventures of a rebellious drag queen fending off his/her rivals. Often cited as a major inspiration for Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Matsumoto's breakthrough film is a visually audacious and lyrically abstract testament to the vertiginous daring of the post-war Japanese avant-garde art and film scenes. Matsumoto orchestrates a series of quite astonishing visual set pieces, including actual performances by the influential Fluxus-inspired street theater groups, the Zero Jigen and Genpei Akasegawa." – Harvard Film Archive

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Five Easy Pieces
Bob Rafelson, 1970, 98 min

“Following Jack Nicholson’s breakout supporting turn in Easy Rider, director Bob Rafelson devised a powerful leading role for the new star in the searing character study Five Easy Pieces. Nicholson plays the now iconic cad Bobby Dupea, a shiftless thirtysomething oil rigger and former piano prodigy immune to any sense of responsibility, who returns to his upper-middle-class childhood home, blue-collar girlfriend (Karen Black) in tow, to see his estranged, ailing father. Moving in its simplicity and gritty in its textures, Five Easy Pieces is a lasting example of early 1970s American alienation.” – Janus Films

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Two-Lane Blacktop
Monte Hellman, 1971, 102 min

"At one level a vivid documentary of American road fever and the obsessive world of street racing, Two-Lane Blacktop is also a sustained meditation on film acting as one of the most dangerous games, a form of high-stakes gambling where everything, including the film itself, is on the table. The film's fable-like story of a spontaneous cross-country race between two cars thus gives way to an extended and explicit showdown between two distinct modes of performance – with the musician non-actors James Taylor and Dennis Wilson in their stripped-down Chevy pitted against the ultimate actor's actor, Warren Oates, driving the decked-out orange GTO that gives him his name. At once a visually brilliant art film and an intoxicating road movie, Two-Lane Blacktop is often cited as the last film of the Sixties, a lonely farewell to the free spirit innocence and rebellious naivety of the ultimately defeated counterculture.” – Harvard Film Archive

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The Panic in Needle Park
Jerry Schatzberg, 1971, 105 min

"One of the quintessential expressions of early 1970s American cinema, Schatzberg’s second feature centers around a fragile woman who, like the characters its co-screenwriter Joan Didion’s early novels, has been set adrift by recent trauma and overly dependent relationships. Shot on location in a wintry and desolate New York City, Panic in Needle Park offers an undaunted and fascinating vision of the secret world of drug addicts with an electrifying Al Pacino – in his first starring role – as a small time hustler and addict and newcomer Kitty Winn as the naive Midwesterner enraptured by his energetic charm. Panic in Needle Park is both a poetic and deeply touching love story and a vivid, documentary-style rendering of the squalor and fear felt by addicts drifting like ghosts through the dirty flophouses, cheap diners and trash-strewn sidewalks of the Upper West Side. Eschewing a music track and any direct appeals to sentimentality, Schatzberg imbues the film with a verité quality that lends an air of wrenching, tragic inevitability to the doomed lovers’ tale." – Harvard Film Archive

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to,     from,
Olivia Douglass, 2024, 1’20 min

Poet Olivia Douglass’s to,    from, gets to the heart of Bushman, exploring the tensions between the estranged and embodied experiences of the African diaspora.

Bushman
David Schickele, 1971, 73 min

Truth is stranger than fiction in Bushman, a rare sort of film portrait, part documentary, part imagined – poetic in its approach to real events. Through a blend of irony, poetry and nuanced storytelling, Bushman follows Gabriel (Paul Elam Nzie Okpokam), a young Nigerian, living in San Francisco. Lovestruck and culturally stranded he faces the harsh realities of life in the 60’s. Interwoven through his adventures in America are glances back to his African origins, and the dualities of the political and racial mood of the US alongside the terrible and elusive Civil War in Nigeria.

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The Spirit of the Beehive
Víctor Erice, 1973, 98 min

"Although declared in an opening credit as set “Once Upon a Time,” Víctor Erice’s remarkable The Spirit of the Beehive takes place in rural Spain in the early 1940s, just after the death of the Second Republic and the start of Franco’s long dictatorship. The fairytale time frame declared by Erice makes clear the powerful role played in his now-classic film by poetic allegory and the childhood imagination as tools of resistance. Released in the dark twilight of the Franco regime, as Spaniards impatiently awaited the impending death of the sickly despot, The Spirit of the Beehive follows a young girl who begins to see visions and waking dreams after watching James Whale’s Frankenstein, screened in an improvised theater by an itinerant showman. An emblem for the monstrous dictatorship and the trance state of political repression enforced upon its citizens, Shelley’s unhuman and uncanny creature (whose name echoes that of the Spanish leader) is here given new life as an invisible yet omnipresent force that represses freedom and reduces outspoken voices to anxious murmurs." – Harvard Film Archive

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Mirror
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974, 102 min

"For the first time," he resolved, "I would use the means of cinema to talk of all that was most precious to me, and do so directly, without playing any kind of tricks." Tarkovsky needed twenty rough cuts before arriving at the film’s intricately interflowing system of flashbacks and archival footage, often interpreted as unfolding in a dying artist’s final rays of consciousness. While Mirror, like all Tarkovsky’s films, pays homage to painting, music, and poetry, it also makes plain that the Russian director understood Mnemosyne to be the mother of the muses. Being a poet, he sought not only to retrieve the past but to reveal its essence – and in so doing to redeem an inherently flawed present. "The story not of the filmmaker’s life," observes Tarkovsky scholar Robert Bird, "but of his visual imagination." – Harvard Film Archive

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F for Fake
Orson Welles, 1974, 85 min

“This playful homage to forgery and illusionism is the last film Orson Welles released before his death. Both a self-portrait and a wry refutation of the auteur principle, its labyrinthine play of paradoxes and ironies creates the cinematic equivalent of an Escher drawing. Described as "a vertigo of lies," the film itself becomes a kind of fake, for although it bears the signature of its author it was in fact the product of many hands. Starting with some found footage of art forger Elmyr de Hory shot by French documentarist François Reichenbach, Welles transforms the material into an interrogation of the nature of truth and illusion, with stops to revisit his own Citizen Kane and The War of the Worlds radio broadcast, detours with Howard Hughes and his hoax biographer Clifford Irving, and a profile of Picasso deceived by love.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Nashville
Robert Altman, 1975, 157 min

"Following dozens of characters around the title city in the days before a political rally featuring country music performers, Nashville brought its already-celebrated director to the pinnacle of acclaim. It is quintessential Altman in its loose narrative structure and large ensemble cast – Altman is said to have ordered screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury to up the number of characters in her script from sixteen to twenty-four. At the same time, it finds this most idiosyncratic of filmmakers engaged with the national mood to an unusual extent. Made in the final days of the Nixon presidency and just ahead of the celebration of the nation’s Bicentennial, Nashville operates on three layers: beyond the loving satire of country music – often misinterpreted as snobbish condescension – lies a prescient cautionary tale about the intertwining of politics and show business, as well as an allegory about Hollywood struggling to respond to a changing nation. The large cast of characters allows the film to move from one register to another as it orchestrates its ideas about politics, big business, entertainment, and a society undergoing rapid change." – Harvard Film Archive

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3 Women
Robert Altman, 1977, 124 min

In a dusty, underpopulated California resort town, a naive southern waif, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), idolises and befriends her fellow nurse, the would-be sophisticate and “thoroughly modern” Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall). When Millie takes Pinky in as her roommate, Pinky’s hero worship evolves into something far stranger and more sinister than either could have anticipated. Featuring brilliant performances from Spacek and Duvall, this dreamlike masterpiece from Robert Altman careens from the humorous to the chilling to the surreal, resulting in one of the most unusual and compelling films of the 1970s.

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Eraserhead
David Lynch, 1977, 89 min

“David Lynch’s 1977 debut feature, Eraserhead, is both a lasting cult sensation and a work of extraordinary craft and beauty. With its mesmerizing black-and-white photography by Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell, evocative sound design, and unforgettably enigmatic performance by Jack Nance, this visionary nocturnal odyssey continues to haunt American cinema like no other film.” – Janus Films

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The Riddles of the Sphinx
Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977, 92 min

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s visually accomplished and intellectually rigorous Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the most important avant-garde films to have emerged from Britain during the 1970s. The second collaboration between Mulvey and Wollen, both of whom are recognised as seminal figures in the field of film theory, Riddles of the Sphinx explores issues of female representation, the place of motherhood within society and the relationship between mother and daughter. Composed of several discrete sections, many of which are shot as continuous circular pans, the film takes place in a range of domestic and public spaces, shot in locations which include Malcolm Le Grice’s kitchen and Stephen Dwoskin’s bedroom.

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A Grin Without a Cat
Chris Marker, 1978, 180 min

Marker’s incomparable editing skills attained a new level of sublimity and subtlety in his epic chronicle of the international New Left’s spectacular rise and fall. At turns mordant and mournful, A Grin Without a Cat uses an extraordinary range of source material – newsreels, propaganda films and Marker’s own footage – to construct a polyphonic, immersive and critical history of political struggle. “I am not boasting that I made a dialectical film. But I have tried for once (having in my time frequently abused the power of the directive commentary) to give back to the spectator, through the montage, “his” commentary, that is, his power.” – Chris Marker

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Days of Heaven
Terrence Malick, 1978, 94 min

“One-of-a-kind filmmaker-philosopher Terrence Malick has created some of the most visually arresting films of the last century, and his glorious period tragedy Days of Heaven, featuring Oscar-winning cinematography by Nestor Almendros, stands out among them. In the mid-1910s, a Chicago steelworker (Richard Gere) accidentally kills his supervisor and flees with his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) and his little sister (Linda Manz) to the Texas panhandle, where they find work harvesting wheat in the fields of a stoic farmer (Sam Shepard). A love triangle, a swarm of locusts, a hellish fire – Malick captures it all with dreamlike authenticity, creating a timeless American idyll that is also a gritty evocation of turn-of-the-century labour.” – Janus Films

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Querelle
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982, 108 min

"Emphasizing through the use of studio sets the heightened artificiality that fascinated Fassbinder late in his career, Querelle tells the story of tangled and nightmarish erotic passions set in the underworld of the French port of Brest. The script is based on Jean Genet’s infamous novel Querelle de Brest, concerning a sailor’s discovery of his homosexuality through rape. As in much of Fassbinder’s work, sexuality is a force employed ruthlessly to maintain power over others. The sailor Querelle (Brad Davis) visits a waterfront brothel where he engages in a game of dice to sleep with the madam (Jeanne Moreau). Losing, he must endure the attentions of her husband instead, an encounter which opens up a new world of previously forbidden attractions and increasingly brutal pleasures, all ruled by the arbitrary laws of the strange establishment in which he finds himself." – Barbara Scharres

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El Sur
Víctor Erice, 1983, 94 min

Ten years after making his mark on Spanish cinema with The Spirit of the Beehive, Víctor Erice returned to filmmaking with this adaptation of a novella by Adelaida García Morales, which deepens the director’s fascination with childhood, fantasy, and the legacy of his country’s civil war. In the North of Spain, Estrella grows up captivated by her father, a doctor with mystical powers – and by the enigma of his youth in the South, a near-mythical region whose secrets haunt Estrella more and more as time goes on. Though Erice’s original vision also encompassed a section set in the South itself, scenes that were never shot, El Sur remains an experience of rare perfection and satisfaction, drawing on painterly cinematography by José Luis Alcaine to evoke the enchantments of memory and the inaccessible, inescapable mysteries of the past.

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Variety
Bette Gordon, 1983, 101 min

“Rightly deserving its cult status, Bette Gordon’s first feature is a pure product of its time. A pioneering example of American underground filmmaking, Variety represents a time capsule brought back by its recent rediscovery. Shot on the streets with a minimum budget and boasting a script by influential experimental novelist and punk poet Kathy Acker, the atmosphere of 1980s New York is ingrained in the film, where Gordon delves into social undercurrents to find transgression that fully deserves Nan Goldin and Cookie Mueller’s names in its credits. The city is dirty and filled with porn theatres, a vision made famous by Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, but Gordon offers no female victims. Instead, the film experiments with gender stereotypes and sexual roles, exploring individual female desires within this urban setting. The film’s heroine finds work in one of these porn theatres, slowly becoming intrigued by the explicit films they screen. Having been stood up by one of the cinema’s regular patrons, she begins to follow men through the city. Her voyeurism questions the gendered gaze common in many forms of visual culture. Gordon enters into feminist debates surrounding pornography, yet avoids being polemic, considering sexual imagery as a tool for self-exploration. This prompts reflection into the depiction of gender throughout cinema, and demands our interrogation of sexual roles within contemporary society.” – ICA

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Short Cuts
Robert Altman, 1993, 187 min

“Prefiguring a string of turn-of-the-21st-century multi-narratives through which a large cast of characters crisscross, Short Cuts remains the most richly woven of the era – not due to a cleverly circular precision or overarching moral message, but rather because of its open, improvisational structure allowing for even more overlapping layers of connective tissue. Revising his ensemble method for a new age, Altman’s disconcerting symphony of several Raymond Carver stories and one original strand ingeniously creates links between the different tales’ disaffected, alienated denizens of Los Angeles – including a phone sex operator, a make-up artist, a news commentator, an artist, a doctor, a baker, a waitress, a chauffeur, a police officer, a pool cleaner, an alcoholic jazz singer and her suicidal daughter, a young boy, and an anonymous dead body found floating in the river. If anything, they are united by a faulty central nervous system of emotional and sexual repression expressed indirectly, inappropriately, or violently. Altman’s miraculous ability to elicit natural performances from his large cast of actors and musicians combines with his orchestral sense of life’s construction – a delicate balance of the haphazardly entropic and the uncannily synchronous.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Underground
Emir Kusturica, 1995, 170 min

This epic tale of friendship, betrayal and romantic entanglement, set against the backdrop of 50 turbulent years of Yugoslavian history earned director Emir Kusturica’s his second Palme d'Or in 1995. A deeply moving and masterful tragic-farce, Underground tells the story of Marko (Miki Manojlović) and Blacky (Lazar Ristovski), two charming rogues making a living on the black market by stealing arms to sell on to the Partisans. Both men are in love with actress Natalija (Mirjana Joković), and in the chaos of war, Marko orchestrates a way to eliminate his competition, by hiding him away in a cellar – for over 20 years – by means of an elaborate charade that the war is still going on.

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Lost Highway
David Lynch, 1997, 134 min

"Most of Lynch’s later films straddle (at least) two realities, and their most ominous moments arise from a dawning awareness that one world is about to cede to another. In Lost Highway, we are introduced to brooding jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) while he lives in a simmering state of jealousy with his listless and possibly unfaithful wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). About one hour in, a rupture fundamentally alters the narrative logic of the film and the world itself becomes a nightmare embodiment of a consciousness out of control. Lost Highway marked a return from the wilderness for Lynch and the arrival of his more radical expressionism – alternating omnipresent darkness with overexposed whiteouts, dead air with the belligerent soundtrack assault of metal-industrial bands, and the tactile sensations that everything is happening with the infinite delusions of schizophrenic thought." – Film Society of Lincoln Centre

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The Piano Teacher
Michael Haneke, 2001, 129 min

“In this riveting study of the dynamics of control, Academy Award–winning director Michael Haneke takes on Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s controversial 1983 novel about perverse female sexuality and the world of classical music. Haneke finds his match in Isabelle Huppert, who delivers an icy but quietly seething performance as Erika, a piano professor at a Viennese conservatory who lives with her mother in a claustrophobically co-dependent relation­ship. Severely repressed, she satisfies her mas­ochistic urges only voyeuristically until she meets Walter (Benoît Magimel), a student whose desire for Erika leads to a destructive infatuation that upsets the careful equilibrium of her life. A critical breakthrough for Haneke, The Piano Teacher – which won the Grand Prix as well as dual acting awards for its stars at Cannes – is a formalist masterwork that remains a shocking sensation.” – Janus Films

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Gerry
Gus Van Sant, 2002, 98 min

Perhaps director Gus Van Sant at his most minimalist and avant-garde, Gerry – set in New Mexico’s Rattlesnake Canyon – pairs Matt Damon and Casey Affleck for what develops into a staggering dual character study. An austere, existential, enigmatic drama – influenced by Chantal Akerman and Béla Tarr!

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The Headless Woman
Lucrecia Martel, 2008, 87 min

“DP Barbara Alvarez imparts a restrained – and very strange – spatial texture to Lucrecia Martel’s excitingly splintered third feature, about a woman (a stunning María Onetto) in a state of phenomenological distress following a mysterious road accident. Martel’s rare gift for building social melodrama from sonic and spatial textures, behavioural nuances, and an unerringly brilliant sense of the joys, tensions, and endless reserves of suppressed emotion lurking within the familial structure is here pushed to another level of creative daring.” – Film at Lincoln Center

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The White Ribbon
Michael Haneke, 2009, 144 min

From its startling opening image of a horse tumbling over a trip wire and violently dislodging its rider, The White Ribbon traces a series of increasingly sinister "accidents" that befall the residents of a rural German village in the days preceding the start of the First World War. The young son of a wealthy baron is caned and hung upside down in a sawmill. Another boy, the mentally disabled son of a midwife, is nearly blinded; an anonymous note strung around his neck states that the children are being punished for the sins of their parents. Gradually, one schoolteacher’s suspicions begin to fall on the children themselves. In its broadest sense a portrait of the formative years of the Nazi generation, Michael Haneke’s meticulous social drama – shot in stunning black-and-white and featuring an extraordinary cast of nonprofessional child actors – continues its maker’s career-spanning fascination with the brutality lurking beneath society’s placid facades, while taking his artistry to a new level of accomplishment.

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Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010, 113 min

"Continuing his miraculous invention of a dark pastoral, Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, [...] melds the last dying encounters of a farmer, Boonmee, with a gorgeously rendered landscape enlivened by the presence of ghostly apparitions. A veranda perched by an intruding forest becomes the astral stage for Boonmee’s transmigrational journey, accompanied by his dead wife, an ectoplasmic entity, and his long-lost son, now manifested as a “monkey ghost.” Weerasethakul’s humble genius is his beguiling ability to allow the primordial and the modern to coexist." – Steve Seid

Two Years at Sea
Ben Rivers, 2011, 88 min

Introduced by Ben Rivers

Ben Rivers’ feature-length documentary debut follows Jake Williams, who lives a life of solitude in the forest of the Scottish Cairngorms after two years working as a merchant at sea. Sleeping, walking, climbing, showering and floating with a feeling of liberation rather than routine, Jake’s daily activities merge together with the changing seasons, finding continuity through an environment which feels completely vacant save for its lone hermit. Shot on black and white 16mm film hand-processed by Rivers himself, the film’s depiction of Jake’s relaxed lifestyle is invigorated by pulsating grain and shifting exposure, marking the image with the pull of the natural world in all its unpredictability.

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Tabu
Miguel Gomes, 2012, 118 min

After Our Beloved Month of August, Miguel Gomes returns with Tabu, an engaging, provocative, and poetic film set both in Portugal and in an un-named African location. Bearing the same title as F. W. Murnau’s classic Tabu, shot in black and white and taking place at least partly in a distant land, Gomes’ third feature film is divided in two distinctive yet complementary storylines. Whilst the first part, shot in 35mm and in the present time, portrays a society wallowing in nostalgia, the second part, shot in 16mm, goes back in time, and plays with history, sound, the concept of linear narration, as well as the ideas of melodrama, slapstick, passion and tragedy. Both parts feature Aurora at two different stages of her life: an older Aurora regrets a past long gone while a younger Aurora dreams of a more passionate life. A virtuoso film, Tabu also offers a reflection on Europe’s colonial past.

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Bacurau
Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles, 2019, 137 min

Bacurau, a small settlement in rural Brazil, is shaken by the death of its elderly matriarch. But something strange is happening in the village, and there’s little time for mourning. The water supply has been cut off, animals are stampeding through the streets, and empty coffins are turning up on the roadside. One morning, the villagers wake up to find their home has disappeared from satellite maps completely. Under threat from an unknown enemy, Bacurau braces itself for a bloody, brutal fight for survival. With unforgettable turns from Udo Kier and Sonia Braga, this is an audacious, original and violent blend of neo-Western and political allegory.

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Long Day's Journey into Night
Bi Gan, 2019, 133 min

Oozing atmosphere with its noirish neon glow, the film chronicles the return of Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) to Kaili, the hometown from which he fled many years before. Back for his father's funeral, Luo recalls the death of an old friend, Wildcat, and searches for lost love Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei), who continues to haunt him. A hushed, hypnotic study of hazy memory, lost time, and flight – and featuring the formidable Sylvia Chang as Wildcat's mother – Long Day's Journey into Night leads the viewer on a nocturnal, labyrinthine voyage, one that both reveals and conceals a world of passion and intrigue.

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First Cow
Kelly Reichardt, 2019, 121 min

Acclaimed, award-winning director Kelly Reichardt returns with the eagerly anticipated First Cow, a moving, delicate and nuanced depiction of male friendship and the American dream, set against the backdrop of the Pacific Northwest in the 1820s. A sumptuous tale of pilfered dairy, sweet cakes and old-fashioned camaraderie, this is the celebrated magnum opus of one of cinema’s most vital independent filmmakers.

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EO
Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022, 88 min

“Legendary director Jerzy Skolimowski created one of his freest and most visually inventive films yet with this story of a grey donkey named EO. After being removed from an itinerant circus, EO begins a trek across the countryside, experiencing cruelty and kindness from a cast of characters including an Italian countess (Isabelle Huppert) and a Polish soccer team. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature, and featuring stunning cinematography by Michał Dymek coupled with Paweł Mykietyn’s resonant score, EO presents the follies and triumphs of humankind from the perspective of its four-legged protagonist on a quest for freedom.” – Janus Films

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Decision to Leave
Park Chan-wook, 2022, 138 min

From a mountain peak in South Korea, a man plummets to his death. Did he jump, or was he pushed? When detective Hae-joon arrives on the scene, he begins to suspect the dead man’s wife Seo-rae may know more than she initially lets on. But as he digs deeper into the investigation, Hae-joon finds himself trapped in a web of deception and desire, proving that the darkest mysteries lurk inside the human heart. With nods toward classic Hollywood and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Decision to Leave is an essential masterwork from the legendary Park Chan-wook, infused with elegance, ingenuity and a razor-sharp precision.

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Fallen Leaves
Aki Kaurismäki, 2023, 1981

Aki Kaurismäki returns with his latest deadpan gem Fallen Leaves, a luminous ode to romance and moviegoing. In modern-day Helsinki, two lonely souls in search of love meet by chance in a local karaoke bar. However, the pair’s path to happiness is beset by numerous obstacles – from lost numbers to mistaken addresses, alcoholism, and a charming stray dog. Moviegoing dreamers, there is hope for us still in this timeless, tender romance. Imbued with the Kaurismäki’s idiosyncratic playfulness and deadpan humour, this bittersweet comedy won the Jury Prize at Cannes.

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Samsara
Lois Patiño, 2023, 113 min

“In Buddhist philosophy, the word “samsara” refers to the nature of life as a cycle of deaths and rebirths. It is this process that Lois Patiño evokes to breath-taking effect in Samsara, a film with a triptych structure that follows a soul from the body of Mon (Simone Milavanh), an elderly woman in Laos, and later into the form of a baby goat in Zanzibar. It is a voyage that probes spiritual and cinematic boundaries to create a deeply moving meditation on what happens after we die and is, at times, a transcendent experience.” – Ben Nicholson

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The Zone of Interest
Jonathan Glazer, 2023, 105 min

In 1943, the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife, Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house right next to the concentration and extermination camp he helped create. Loosely inspired by the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis, Glazer has created a singular, unsettlingly timeless representation of inhumanity and our capacity for indifference in the face of atrocity, filmed and edited with aptly cold precision and punctuated with an ominous score by Mica Levi.

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Evil Does Not Exist
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2024, 105 min

Urban ambitions clash with nature in a quiet village near Tokyo in this eco-fable from the director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Takumi and his daughter Hana live in Mizubiki Village, close to Tokyo. Like generations before them, they live a modest life according to the cycles and order of nature. One day, the village inhabitants become aware of a plan to build a glamping site near Takumi’s house, offering city residents a comfortable ‘escape’ to nature. When two company representatives from Tokyo arrive in the village to hold a meeting, it becomes clear that the project will harm the local water supply, causing unrest. The agency’s mismatched intentions endanger both the ecological balance of the nature plateau and their way of life, with an aftermath that affects Takumi’s life.

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