Pickpocket
Robert Bresson, 1959, 73 min 

“This incomparable story of crime and redemption from the French master Robert Bresson follows Michel, a young pickpocket who spends his days working the streets, subway cars, and train stations of Paris. As his compulsive pursuit of the thrill of stealing grows, however, so does his fear that his luck is about to run out. A cornerstone of the career of this most economical and profoundly spiritual of filmmakers, Pickpocket is an elegantly crafted, tautly choreographed study of humanity in all its mischief and grace, the work of a director at the height of his powers.” – Janus Films

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Breathless
Jean-Luc Godard, 1960, 90 min

"One of the most important films to emerge from the French New Wave, Breathless is set in the fifties, when the influence of American culture in France was being felt at every level of life. Godard presents a story of boy-meets-girl animated by myths of innocence abroad and of the alienated gangster of B-movies. Belmondo’s interpretation of an anarchic criminal – confused, bitter, and cynical – was his first major role and launched his career. Godard conceived of Jean Seberg’s character as a direct continuation of the pampered but worldly creature she played in Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse. Describing the impact of the film after forty years, critic Phillip Lopate summarizes: "It seemed a new kind of storytelling, with its saucy jump cuts, digressions, quotes, in jokes and addresses to the viewer. And yet, underneath all these brash interventions was a Mozartean melancholy that strongly suggested classical measure."" – Harvard Film Archive

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Paris Belongs to Us
Jacques Rivette, 1961, 141 min

An underseen early French New Wave landmark, Jacques Rivette’s superb feature debut pulsates with the turmoil of an emerging cinematic revolution. Filmed over a two-year period, Rivette’s debut follows a young literature student who befriends a group of meandering twentysomethings, with tensions soon arising. Featuring cameos by fellow Cahiers du Cinéma critics Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard, it captures a real sense of the city during the rudderless Cold War era.

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The Caretaker
Clive Donner, 1963, 105 min

“Whilst renovating his dilapidated home, Aston (Robert Shaw) invites an irritable and devious vagrant (Donald Pleasance) to stay. But, when his ill-tempered brother Mick (Alan Bates) returns, an ominous yet darkly comic power struggle between the trio commences. A play that changed the face of modern theatre and made Harold Pinter's name, The Caretaker remains one of Pinter’s most famous works. Featuring original production cast members Pleasance and Bates and sensitively directed by Clive Donner and shot by Nicolas Roeg, this study of shared illusion, tragic dispossession and the fraternal bond of unspoken love, combines mesmerising performances and the magic of Pinter's dialogue into a spellbinding film.” – BFI

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Contempt
Jean-Luc Godard, 1963, 99 min

In memory of Brigitte Bardot

"Godard’s adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel – perhaps it was more of a springboard – had a million-dollar budget, half of which went to its star Brigitte Bardot, with a sizable portion of the rest going to Jack Palance and to Fritz Lang. With what little was left, Godard made what many now consider to be one of his greatest films in five weeks. Palance is the producer who brings screenwriter Michel Piccoli and his wife (Bardot) to Cinécittà to work on Lang’s adaptation of The Odyssey, and the conflicts between commerce and art, the ancient and the modern, the legendary and the mundane, the tender and the cruel commence." - Film Society of Lincoln Centre

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8½
Federico Fellini, 1963, 138 min

"A traffic-jam nightmare, a literal flight of fancy, nuns and whores and more: 8 1/2 follows the dreams and visions of a jaded director (Marcello Mastroianni) as he bemusedly attempts his next great film, which may or may not take precedence over his own sexual desires. Fellini’s masterpiece “brought an entirely new dimension to the cinema: no fiction film had ever used dream and fantasy images for a serious examination of the psyche in so smooth, seamless, and uncontrived a way. The events in 8 1/2 are galvanized and made profound by startling representations [whose] sudden and unmarked entrance into the film becomes essential to a depiction of the crucial moments in the life of [an] artist who, despite his confusion and uncertainty, is making a supremely honest effort to understand himself and the springs of his creativity,” Seymour Chatman wrote. In the end, Fellini’s protagonist and alter ego recognizes himself as “an artist who can do nothing better – indeed, nothing other – than what he wants and needs to do, namely, to put through the hoops of his own aesthetic sensibility the lovable beings who have shaped his life.”" – BAMPFA

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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 neighbours; 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 labours, 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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Alphaville
Jean-Luc Godard, 1965, 95 min

This classic of the French New Wave cinema is a dazzling amalgam of film noir and science fiction that features tough gumshoe Lemmy Caution (Constantine) as an intergalactic agent sent to conquer Alpha 60, a strange city from which love and tenderness have been banished. Godard pursues his theme of alienation in a technological society by turning contemporary Paris into an icily dehumanized city of the future.

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The Pornographers
Shohei Imamura, 1966, 121 min

“Subu makes pornographic films. He sees nothing wrong with it. They are an aid to a repressed society, and he uses the money to support his landlady, Haru, and her family. From time to time, Haru shares her bed with Subu, though she believes her dead husband, reincarnated as a carp, disapproves. Director Shohei Imamura has always delighted in the kinky exploits of lowlifes, and in this 1966 classic, he finds subversive humour in the bizarre dynamics of Haru, her Oedipal son, and her daughter, the true object of her pornographer-boyfriend's obsession. Imamura's comic treatment of such taboos as voyeurism and incest sparked controversy when the film was released, but The Pornographers has outlasted its critics, and now seems frankly ahead of its time.” – Janus Films

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Daisies
Věra Chytilová, 1966, 73 min 

“If the entire world is bad, why shouldn’t we be? Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová), both named Marie, embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. But what happens when the fun is over? Matching her anarchic message with an equally radical aesthetic, director Věra Chytilová, with the close collaboration of cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, unleashes an optical storm of fluctuating film stocks, kaleidoscopic montages, cartoonish stop-motion cutouts, and surreal costumes designed by Ester Krumbachová, who also cowrote the script. The result is Daisies, the most defiant provocation of the Czechoslovak New Wave, an exuberant call to rebellion aimed squarely at those who uphold authoritarian oppression in any form.” – Janus Films

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Andrei Rublev
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966, 183 min

“With his second feature, a towering epic that took him years to complete, Andrei Tarkovsky waded deep into the past and emerged with a visionary masterwork. Threading together several self-contained episodes, the filmmaker traces the renowned icon painter Andrei Rublev through the harsh realities of fifteenth-century Russian life, vividly conjuring the dark and otherworldly atmosphere of the age: a primitive hot-air balloon takes to the sky, snow falls inside an unfinished church, naked pagans celebrate the midsummer solstice, a young man oversees the casting of a gigantic bell. Appearing here in Tarkovsky’s preferred 183-minute cut, as well as the version that was originally censored by Soviet authorities, Andrei Rublev is an arresting meditation on art, faith, and endurance, and a powerful reflection on expressive constraints in the director’s own time.” – Janus Films

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Theorem
Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968, 98 min

"With Teorema, a coolly cryptic exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness, Pier Paolo Pasolini moved beyond the poetic, proletarian earthiness that first won him renown. Terence Stamp stars as the mysterious stranger – perhaps an angel, perhaps a devil – who, one by one, seduces the members of a wealthy Milanese family (including European cinema icons Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Laura Betti, and Anne Wiazemsky), precipitating an existential crisis in each of their lives. Unfolding nearly wordlessly, this tantalizing metaphysical riddle – blocked from exhibition by the Catholic Church for degeneracy – is at once a blistering Marxist treatise on sex, religion, and art and a primal scream into the void.” – Janus Films

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Death by Hanging
Nagisa Oshima, 1968, 118 min

“Genius provocateur Nagisa Oshima made one of his most startling political statements with the compelling pitch-black satire Death by Hanging. In this macabre farce, a Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next. At once disturbing and oddly amusing, Oshima’s constantly surprising film is a subversive and surreal indictment of both capital punishment and the treatment of Korean immigrants in his country.” – Janus Films

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The Conformist
Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970, 113 min

Bernardo Bertolucci’s stylish period thriller stars Jean-Louis Trintignant as a repressed bureaucrat in Mussolini’s Italy who is assigned to kill his former professor. Bertolucci’s elegant but chilling drama about the psychology of fascism unfolds through a complex flashback structure, as Marcello Clerici (Trintignant) is driven in final pursuit of Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), his onetime philosophy tutor and now a renowned anti-Fascist whom he has been ordered to assassinate. Richly designed by Ferdinando Scarfiotti to reflect the fashions and imposing architecture of the Mussolini era, the film is stunningly shot by Vittorio Storaro, whose gleaming, dynamic cinematography later proved an inspiration to American directors such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

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Taking Off
Milos Forman, 1971, 89 min

“I think we oughta change the balance of power a little bit. I’m saving up to buy an intercontinental ballistic missile.” – Milos Forman

“Milos Forman’s first American movie is a hilarious parody of the generation gap at its most gaping. A teenage girl sneaks out of the house to audition for a singing contest. Her parents, imagining that she has either run away, become a druggie, a hooker, or joined the Manson Family, begin combing the city for her. They find other parents, also searching for their children. They end up with hundreds of others at a seminar of the Society for the Parents of Fugitive Children, where their boundaries are challenged and expanded. Meanwhile, the kids are desperately trying to express their unfulfilled yearnings through music. The kids are lost. The parents are lost. An affectionate and funny film with equal empathy for both sides.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Fata Morgana
Werner Herzog, 1971, 79 min

Considered by many to be the quintessential masterpiece among Werner Herzog’s early works, Fata Morgana is an absorbing collection of images shot in an around the Sahara Desert combined with poetic voice-over and music by Leonard Cohen, all coming together to evoke an alien world that is actually our own. “Even though obviously shot on Earth, the film does not necessarily show the beauty and harmony and horror of our world, rather some kind of a utopia – or dystopia – of beauty and harmony and horror.” – Werner Herzog

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Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Werner Herzog, 1972, 95 min

“The first of Werner Herzog’s legendary – and notoriously tempestuous – collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski is a feverish account of sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre’s obsessive quest through the South American rainforest to discover the fabled city of gold, El Dorado, a crazed delusion that leads him and his band of explorers into the heart of darkness. Kinski’s unhinged performance, the mystical score by Popol Vuh, and the lush, hallucinatory jungle images come together in one of the most haunting, deliriously inspired visions in all of 1970s cinema, a senses-shattering journey to the edge of madness.” – Janus Films

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The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972, 124 min

In the early 1970s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered the American melodramas of Douglas Sirk and was inspired by them to begin working in a new, more intensely emotional register. One of the first and best-loved films of this period in his career is The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, which balances a realistic depiction of tormented romance with staging that remains true to the director’s roots in experimental theatre. This unforgettable, unforgiving dissection of the imbalanced relationship between a haughty fashion designer (Margit Carstensen) and a beautiful but icy ingenue (Hanna Schygulla) – based, in a sly gender reversal, on the writer-director’s own desperate obsession with a young actor – is a true Fassbinder affair, featuring exquisitely claustrophobic cinematography by Michael Ballhaus and full-throttle performances by an all-female cast.

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Pictures of the Old World
Dušan Hanák, 1972, 64 min

“Inspired by the photographs of Slovak artist Martin Martinček whose pictures distilled entire lifetimes into luminous and intransient images, Hanák created his own distinctive impressions of the artist's work in reflecting a myriad of human stories. At odds with the Communist propaganda of the time, the authorities withdrew the film from release and it remained condemned and banned for many years. Hanák's film, however, is not political or polemical but explores much more fundamental levels of human experience. Its power and beauty lie in its unique portrait of a people left behind by the modern world.” – Second Run

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Cries and Whispers
Ingmar Bergman, 1973, 91 min

“This existential wail of a drama from Ingmar Bergman concerns two sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), keeping vigil for a third, Agnes (Harriet Andersson), who is dying of cancer and can find solace only in the arms of a beatific servant (Kari Sylwan). An intensely felt film that is one of Bergman’s most striking formal experiments, Cries and Whispers (which won an Oscar for the extraordinary colour photography of Sven Nykvist) is a powerful depiction of human behaviour in the face of death, positioned on the borders between reality and nightmare, tranquillity and terror.” – Janus Films

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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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Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975, 116 min

“Disillusioned by the sexual revolution, which he felt had only entrenched sexuality in consumerism and bourgeois rationalism, Pasolini disowned his “Trilogy of Life,” the three early 1970s films intended as erotic celebrations of the body, and responded with his most notorious and final film, Salò. Set in northern Italy during the last days of Mussolini’s reign, the film liberally adapts Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, using the tale of amoral libertines who kidnap young victims for a sacrificial orgy to launch a ruthless and wide-ranging attack on modernity as a whole. Setting up equivalences between Sadean sexual license, Italian fascism and consumerist alienation, Salò delivers a trenchant political allegory that tends to be overshadowed by its explicit nudity and images of sexual sadism.” – Harvard Film Archive

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The Passenger
Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975, 119 min

"Antonioni’s troubled characters often speak of escape to a foreign land or beginning their lives anew. In The Passenger Jack Nicholson’s David Locke, a television journalist travelling into the depths of Africa attempts to realize further liberation by trading his identity with that of a dead man. Gradually picking up clues as the audience does about his new self’s precarious livelihood, he discovers a more active, passionate, political participant of life. When an equally mysterious woman mirrors and diffuses his displaced self even more, they flee together from pursuers of both men. Interweaving actual and fictional documentary footage with fluid, dissolve-less movements back and forth in time, Antonioni delivers a subtly and profoundly rich existential treatise. All cinematic elements and spaces flow seamlessly to the deceptively leisurely choreography of the camera, concluding with the brilliant tracking shot at the end of an inscrutably drawn double-ellipsis." – Harvard Film Archive

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Cría cuervos
Carlos Saura, 1976, 109 min

"Carlos Saura's exquisite Cría cuervos heralded a turning point in Spain: shot while General Franco was on his deathbed, the film melds the personal and the political in a portrait of the legacy of fascism and its effects on a middle-class family (the title derives from the Spanish proverb: “Raise ravens and they’ll peck out your eyes”). Ana Torrent (the dark-eyed beauty from The Spirit of the Beehive) portrays the disturbed eight-year-old Ana, living in Madrid with her two sisters and mourning the death of her mother, whom she conjures as a ghost (an ethereal Geraldine Chaplin). Seamlessly shifting between fantasy and reality, the film subtly evokes both the complex feelings of childhood and the struggles of a nation emerging from the shadows." – Janus Films

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Stroszek
Werner Herzog, 1976, 103 min

“One of Herzog's most accessible films, Stroszek is a lyrical, melancholy, bitterly funny tale of three oddly-assorted Berlin misfits who follow the American Dream to Wisconsin and find a bleak El Dorado of television, football, CB radio, truck stops, and mobile homesteading. The title role is played by Herzog's unique actor Bruno S., with Eva Mattes as a soulful whore, and Clemens Scheitz as an eccentric old man conducting a homemade search for the secrets of animal magnetism.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Stalker
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979, 163 min

"Arguably Tarkovsky’s purest articulation of the film as spiritual quest, Stalker develops a radically different attitude to time than the jigsaw of his previous film, Mirror. “I wanted it to be as if the whole film had been made in a single shot,” Tarkovsky wrote. In the event, Stalker is comprised of 142 – each chiselled with the greatest precision. The basic outline of the plot derives from Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic: ascetic Stalker leads Writer and Professor, both figures of intellectual disenchantment, from a barren wasteland into the lush post-industrial environs of The Zone, a mysterious and forbidden territory believed to actualize desires. Tarkovsky identified with each of the characters but was especially drawn to Stalker as “the best part of myself, and also the part that is the least real.”" – Harvard Film Archive

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Fitzcarraldo
Werner Herzog, 1982, 160 min

“Werner Herzog’s infamously arduous productions were already legendary when he outdid himself with Fitzcarraldo, a feat as utterly quixotic and improbable as its protagonist. Klaus Kinski stars as the wild-eyed turn-of-the-century Irishman Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald who, before he can realize his dream of building an opera house in the Peruvian jungle, must complete an equally monumental undertaking: hauling an enormous riverboat across a mountain, a spectacle achieved by Herzog and his crew not with models and special effects but through sheer Herculean will. Graced with images of breathtaking poetic beauty, Fitzcarraldo stands as a monument to the audacity of uncompromising artistic vision.” – Janus Films

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Taipei Story
Edward Yang, 1985, 110 min

“Yang’s close friend, master filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, delivers a remarkable lead performance as a former Little League baseball star faced with an empty future and painfully nostalgic for his childhood success. Hou’s character is caught in the complex grid of obligatory and accidental relationships traced by Yang against the backdrop of Taipei’s first economic awakening. While the film’s English-language title (assigned by Yang himself) deliberately echoes Ozu, its restrained exploration of urban malaise is better compared to Antonioni. What Taipei Story has in common with both Ozu and Antonioni is a concern for the moral and intellectual lassitude and pervasive disillusionment that gradually takes hold in the wake of an economic boom.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Blood
Pedro Costa, 1989, 95 min 

“Few filmmakers can boast a body of work as audacious, beautiful or challenging as that of Pedro Costa. Filmed in startling monochrome and demonstrating a love and knowledge of classical Hollywood and European art cinema, Blood is a lushly stylized romantic fable. It explores the plight of two brothers coming to terms with the death of their father and the legacy of violence and debt he has left behind. Languid and unsettling, beautiful and intimate, with echoes of Tourneur, Bresson, Ray and Straub-Huillet, Blood is both elusive and utterly mesmerising.” – Second Run

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Casa de lava
Pedro Costa, 1994, 105 min

“Cape Verde’s colonial histories and displaced emigrants have been central to many of Costa’s films, but his rarely seen second feature is the only one thus far to have been shot on the archipelago. Leão (Isaach de Bankolé), the comatose labourer whose removal to his home at Fogo jump-starts the film, is a clear precursor to Costa’s now iconic Ventura, with whom he shares a profession and a past. But the fierce, unblinking attention the film gives to the colonists is the revelation: Edith Scob as an aging Portuguese woman who has made the island her ill-fitting home; Pedro Hestnes as her son; and Inês de Medeiros as the Lisbon nurse who accompanies Leão. Inspired by Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie, this is one of Costa’s most direct reckonings with Portugal’s colonial legacy.” – Film Society of Lincoln Center

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Beau travail
Claire Denis, 1999, 90 min

"Denis and her near-constant collaborator, screenwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau, reimagine Melville’s Billy Budd as a tale of jealousy and homoerotic desire amongst a company of French Legionnaires in remote Djibouti. The beautiful sparseness and enigmatic quality of Beau travail is informed by Denis’ interest in contemporary choreography and her careful attention to the legionnaires' training and exercise, rituals that suggest both the cohesion of and the unspoken tensions within the unit. In a film of few words the soldiers' sculptural bodies become expressive markers of the ways in which belonging, tenderness and violence trouble contemporary masculinity." – Harvard Film Archive

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Yi Yi
Edward Yang, 2000, 173 min

“Edward Yang’s beloved final completed film blends the critical eye of his “Taipei trilogy” with a gentler version of his trenchant, stinging comedies. Yang’s remarkable eye for detail is evident throughout Yi Yi’s sensitive chronicle of an upper-middle class Taiwanese family shaken by a series of unexpected – yet, in retrospect, clearly inevitable – events. As the middle-aged parents ruminate over past decisions and grow anxious for the future, their children grapple with the burdens of growing up. Like so many of Yang’s films, Yi Yi is a carefully orchestrated, almost musical ensemble piece that masterfully interweaves its characters rather in the manner of Renoir’s Rules of the Game. And like Renoir, Yang reveals himself to be a consummate observer of behaviour, able to discern the comic and the tragic sides of the human predicament.” – Harvard Film Archive

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Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Tsai Ming-liang, 2003, 81 min

“In Taipei City, a cavernous old picture palace is about to close its doors forever. A meagre audience, the remaining few staff, and perhaps even a ghost or two, watch King Hu's wuxia classic Dragon Inn – each haunted by memories and desires evoked by cinema itself. An exquisite, wryly funny and tender tribute to the experience of movie-going, Tsai Ming-Liang's poignant love letter to cinema is one of the most beguiling and beloved dramas of modern times and is now widely regarded as a classic.” – Second Run

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Wendy and Lucy
Kelly Reichardt, 2009, 80 min

"Scarcity is a defining logic and theme of Reichardt’s films, equally expressed in their carefully distilled stories as in the modest productions that resourcefully glean complex meaning from each measured performance and location. Wendy and Lucy is exemplary here for its transformation of a streamlined narrative (adapted from a Jon Raymond story) of a young woman and her dog into a vivid portrait of post-Katrina America that soberly contemplates the fine and frightening line between barely getting by and dire poverty. The well-deserved critical acclaim that greeted Reichardt’s minimal masterpiece was helped, no doubt, by the presence of a deglamourized Michelle Williams in an admirably understated turn as the proud Wendy, who is convinced, despite many signs to the contrary, that a new future lies in her waylaid and increasingly difficult journey to Alaska and the promise of a cannery job. The presence, and sudden absence, of Wendy’s dog, Lucy – Reichardt’s own beloved pet – becomes a poignant test of Wendy’s resolve. A high point of Reichardt’s career, Wendy and Lucy also stands as a defining work of the neo-realist filmmaking that transformed American independent cinema in the early 2000s." – Harvard Film Archive

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Melancholia
Lars von Trier, 2011, 135 min

The possibilities for ecological apocalypse extend beyond the bounds of even our own solar system in Lars von Trier’s cosmic-view diptych drama, which begins with a wedding party gone awry and ends in the shadow of an incoming extinction-level event. Shot through from beginning to end with a profound feeling for what it is to live in the grips of depression, as Kirsten Dunst’s baleful bride predicts forthcoming catastrophe, telling her sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg): “The Earth is evil, we don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it.” Von Trier has created a disaster film for the ages, both immeasurably sad and beautiful.

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Good Time
Josh & Benny Safdie, 2017, 99 min  

After Heaven Knows What, filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie return to the mean streets of New York City with Good Time, a hypnotic crime thriller that explores with bracing immediacy the tragic sway of family and fate. After a botched bank robbery lands his younger brother in prison, Constantine "Connie" Nikas (Robert Pattinson) embarks on a twisted odyssey through the city's underworld in an increasingly desperate – and dangerous – attempt to get his brother Nick (Benny Safdie) out of jail. Over the course of one adrenalized night, Connie finds himself on a mad descent into violence and mayhem as he races against the clock to save his brother and himself, knowing their lives hang in the balance.

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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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Pompei: Below the Clouds
Gianfranco Rosi, 2025, 114 min

“From award-winning filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi comes Pompei: Below the Clouds, a striking portrait of life in Naples, a city living in the shadow of Vesuvius. Beneath the quiet threat of eruption, people go about their days: archaeologists unearth the past, children learn as the earth hums, firefighters wait for the next call. The result is a portrait at once local and universal: a reflection on humanity’s capacity to live, love, and rebuild in the shadow of the unimaginable.” – ICA

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