Feature Films

Admirers of Pedro Costa’s more recent work are often thrown for a thrilling loop by the glossy, liquid textures and lush atmospherics of the director’s first feature, a beguiling fairytale about the trials undergone by two brothers in the wake of their father’s violent death. “O Sangue,” Costa said in an interview, “was also the beginning of my love—maybe love is the wrong word—for domestic cinema. A kind of cinema that shows how people live.”

Presented in a beautiful restoration and newly translated, Hong Sangsoo’s breakthrough second feature is an early masterwork from the prolific filmmaker. Playing with structure, perspective and time – elements that would become hallmarks of his later work – the film follows a young woman, Jisook, who, fresh off her relationship with a married man, joins two girlfriends for a vacation in the mountainous Kangwon region and quickly makes the same mistakes.

Award winning director Hong SangSoo dishes up a fresh take on modern courtship. When filmmaker Young-soo introduces his wealthy gallery owner friend Jae-hoon to another friend, the female television writer Soo-jung, the table is set for a complicated triangular relationship. 

Pennsylvania-born filmmaker Ephraim Asili has been exploring different facets of the African diaspora—and his own place within it—for nearly a decade. His feature-length debut, The Inheritance, is a vibrant, engaging ensemble work, a re-enactment of his own experience, that takes place almost entirely within the walls of a West Philadelphia house where a community of young people have come together to form a collective of Black artists and activists. 

Helmed by Tsai Ming-liang, Days is a Drama that doesn't mince words. Minimalist and slowly paced, the film features little dialogue. Under the pain of illness and treatment, Kang (Lee Kang-sheng) finds himself adrift. He meets Non (Anong Houngheuangsy) in a foreign land. They find consolation in each other before parting ways and carrying on with their days.

A prize-winner at the Venice Film Festival and Ukraine’s official submission for the 93rd Academy Awards, Atlantis is a gorgeous and visionary sci-fi drama. In 2025, Eastern Ukraine is a desert unsuitable for human habitation, water a dear commodity brought by trucks. Sergiy, a former soldier, meets Katya while she’s on a humanitarian mission. Together, they try to return to some sort of normal life in which they are also allowed to fall in love again.

After her relationship with NYPD intelligence agent Gerard ends terribly, tired and disillusioned actress Stephanie hides in a house where a band is working on a record, which proves to be less of an escape than she imagined. Deftly lensed in 16mm and unfurling as a digressive, tantalizingly off-kilter mystery, Slow Machine is a fascinating work pitched at the intersection of American independent cinema and the avant-garde theater of Richard Foreman and the Wooster Group.

Imbued with the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson and filtered through the sensibilities of Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon, three unconnected, voiceover-narrated tales each start off innocently enough and then veer into ever stranger, more fascinating realms. In this adventurous feature from the director of La Flor, secret identities, missing persons, lost treasures, exotic beasts and desperate criminals are only a few of the elements woven into a grand tapestry of mysteries.

Paulo Rocha’s haunting second feature, Change of Life, is a beautifully-told story of a young man who returns from abroad to his small fishing village to discover that much has changed. Inspired by his work with Manoel de Oliveira, Rocha “cast” the local villagers as themselves, interspersed with experienced actors led by the great Isabel Ruth. The film was a critical and commercial success upon release, though it would effectively be the last film Rocha made for nearly two decades.

Never before released in the US, Paulo Rocha’s debut feature The Green Years, gloriously shot in black and white, is an extraordinary and haunting coming-of-age tale. Nineteen-year-old Julio heads to Lisbon from the provinces and gets a job as a shoemaker for his uncle Raul. But when he meets Ilda, a confident young housemaid who becomes a regular shop visitor, the two begin a tentative romance until the realities of the outside world come crashing through.

In this critically-acclaimed film, director Dan Sallitt charts a friendship between two young women. Mara and Jo, in their twenties, have been close friends since middle school. It soon becomes apparent that Jo, despite her intellectual gifts, is unreliable in her professional life, losing and acquiring jobs at a troubling rate. Substance abuse may be responsible for Jo’s instability… but some observers suspect a deeper problem. 

Evelyn Bell, a Catholic professor of theology, and her younger sister Virginia are reunited after many years when Virginia returns home in a depression after being ejected from a religious cult. At a lakeside retreat in Northeastern Pennsylvania, the sisters try to reestablish their relationship, talking about their very different systems of belief, and about the oppressive childhood that still hangs over them. From filmmaker Dan Sallitt.

Mimi and Michael, in their thirties, marry suddenly after years of friendship and go on their honeymoon without having had a physical relationship. The honeymoon turns into a nightmare of sexual failure and conflict, fueled by Mimi's anxiety. With the marriage hanging by a thread, the couple try to resolve their problems against all odds. From filmmaker Dan Sallitt.

Filmmaker Joong-rae, suffering from writer’s block, takes a trip to the coast with his production designer Chang-wook, who brings along the vivacious Moon-sook. Soon after their arrival, Moon-sook falls for Joong-rae’s advances; however, the fickle hero can’t commit and he awkwardly parts with her. What had been a sardonic Jules and Jim turns into a burlesque Vertigo when Joong-rae returns to the coastal resort and attempts to recreate the original romance with a woman who resembles Moon-sook, until his jilted lover shows up…

Shot in the narrow alleys, petite cafes and beautiful hanok inns of Seoul’s historic Jong-ro district, a favorite Hong location, Hill of Freedom is a masterful, alternately funny and haunting, tale of love and longing from the great director. Kwon (Seo Young-hwa) returns to Seoul from a restorative stay in the mountains. She is given a packet of letters left by Mori (Ryo Kase, Like Someone In Love), who has come back from Japan to propose to her. As she walks down a flight of stairs, Kwon drops and scatters the letters, all of which are undated. When she reads them, she has to make sense of the chronology… and so must we. 

A major work of the celebrated Berlin School, the debut of Ulrich Köhler (In My Room) is a mesmerizing portrait of a young German soldier named Paul who goes AWOL and returns to his childhood home in the countryside. With Köhler’s penchant for deadpan humor and subtle performances, Bungalow becomes a quiet mockery of militarism, familial estrangement, and youthful ennui. New 4K Restoration.

A man goes into the woods alone. We know nothing about him, apart from his military-style attire with a nametag indicating he might be called Wilcox. Is he a traumatized veteran, a survivalist, a desperate man or even a philosopher-hermit? A documentary style fictional film, a minimalist adventure yarn haunted by reality, Wilcox, from award-winning filmmaker Denis Cote, is both simple and mysterious, a non-judgmental perspective on people who decide to remove themselves from the world.

Winner of the Golden Leopard for Best Film and Best Actress at the Locarno Film Festival, Vitalina Varela is the masterful new film from acclaimed director Pedro Costa. A work of deeply concentrated beauty, it stars nonprofessional actor Vitalina Varela in a remarkable performance (based on her life), as a Cape Verdean woman who hopes to reunite with her husband after decades of separation due to economic circumstance, only to arrive in a strange land mere days after his funeral.

A decade in the making, filmed around the world, and featuring the same four remarkable actresses in six episodes (each a different genre), Mariano Llinás’ landmark 14-hour feature film La Flor is an unrepeatable labor of love and madness that redefines the concept of binge viewing; a wildly entertaining exploration of the possibilities of fiction and storytelling. A must-see.

During NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999, a truck driver is hired to undertake a treacherous journey across his war-torn country to deliver mysterious cargo. Brilliantly photographed and overwhelmingly atmospheric - recalling Clouzot's The Wages of Fear and Friedkin's Sorcerer - The Load is a taut suspense thriller about the choices we make in difficult times.

At once literary and gently cinematic, Patrick Wang's (A Bread Factory, In The Family) second feature is based on Leah Hager Cohen’s critically acclaimed novel. After suffering a tragic loss, a family welcomes an unexpected visitor into their lives and find themselves growing more alert to the hurt, humor, warmth, and grief of others.

The Independent Spirit Award-nominated debut of acclaimed filmmaker Patrick Wang (A Bread Factory, The Grief of Others), In The Family is a heartfelt story woven around child custody, two-Dad families, loss, interracial relations, the American South, and the nature of what it means to be in a family, all explored with ambitious and rewarding nuance.

From the Academy Award nominated director of DRIVE MY CAR. A truly original Vertigo riff, based on a novel by Tomoka Shibasaki, Asako I & II is a mysterious and intoxicating pop romance. Ryusuke Hamaguchi's beguiling film traces the trajectory of a love—or, to be accurate, two loves—found, lost, displaced, and regained.

Sometimes the end of the word can be a new beginning. In this boldly original take on the last man on earth genre, filmmaker Ulrich Kohler – part of the acclaimed Berlin School, a loosely defined group that includes Christian Petzold and Maren Ade – tells the story of a man adrift who awakens one morning to discover that seemingly all of humanity has disappeared.

A director speaks at length to a psychoanalyst, confiding his obsessions, fears, ideas about cinema, and creative blocks. Based on his own six-day psychoanalytic treatment with trauma specialist Zohar Rubinstein, Heinz Emigholz’s latest masterwork is a demonstration of his singular working methods, and a playful, moving treatise on trauma and architecture.

A young man disappears while working on a biography of an enigmatic and controversial political theorist in Ricky D'Ambrose's extraordinary debut film. Set inside New York City apartments, subway stations, bookstores and cafés, Notes has been hailed as "an anti-mystery in the tradition of L’Avventura assembled with the cool reserve of Robert Bresson." (Village Voice)

Questions of faith, tradition and honor course through de Los Santos Arias’ rapturous crime fable. Set in the Dominican Republic, Cocote follows a kind-hearted gardener, an Evangelical Christian, who has returned home to take part in traditional mourning rituals for his father's death, only to discover that he is expected to commit an unthinkable act.

A fable-like road movie, Araby is a beautifully written and photographed story about a young boy who discovers an old notebook and is soon swept up in the writer's wanderings, adventures and loves; a twenty-year journey across the Brazilian countryside in search of a better life.

Using letters Anna Magdalena Bach wrote to her husband, Johann Sebastian, filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet created one of the most precise, rewarding biopics ever put to screen. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, this masterpiece has been immaculately restored.

A faithful adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s Othon, the classic tragedy that premiered at the court of Louis XIV at Fontainebleau in 1664 and today is more hallowed than actually performed, Eyes do not want to close… depicts the power vacuum that followed Emperor Nero’s death.

This complex interpretation of Brecht’s unfinished novel The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar explores history as it has been written by the victors, with their hero worship of tyrannical leaders (whether Caesar or Hitler), and offers an alternate view of history writing as fractured and potentially revolutionary.

One of Straub-Huillet's major films, this adaptation of Schoenberg’s unfinished opera is a thrilling and rigorous consideration of Biblical and archaeological history; set almost entirely within a Roman amphitheater whose history lends every precise line-reading and gesture, every startling camera move and cut, a totalizing force.

Something as simple as a herring roasting on a hearth, or a meal of bread, wine and winter melon, takes on the humble aura of a Caravaggio painting in Straub-Huillet's masterful tragicomedy about Sicilians who are poor of means but rich in spirit. “A passionate and wide-ranging masterwork by Straub and Huillet." (The New Yorker). New 20th anniversary digital restoration. 

Six scenes concerning resistance to “forms of domination and violence of man on man,” including Communist prisoners who face down their Fascist interrogators during World War II and Egyptian workers and peasants who revolt against their colonial exploiters in 1919.

A terrorism thriller like no other, recalling Robert Bresson’s The Devil, Probably as much as it does George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the acclaimed new film from Bertrand Bonello (Saint Laurent) is one of the 21st century’s most provocative and stirring cinematic experiences.

One of the year’s most bracingly original debuts, The Human Surge is a global journey that jumps from Argentina to the Philippines to Mozambique, a road movie that fuses fiction and documentary for a portrait of today’s youth at a time of economic uncertainty and illusory hyper-connection.

Winner of the Critics Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Oliver Laxe’s stunning new film, Mimosas, is a breathtakingly-shot Western that follows a mysterious caravan transporting a dying sheikh into the Moroccan Atlas Mountains.

Conceived as a documentary, director Pietro Marcello (Martin Eden) had to change course when his lead, a humble shepherd turned local hero, passed away during production. The resulting film is a beautiful and fantastical ode to his memory and their beloved country.

Lav Diaz' follow up to his acclaimed Norte, the End of History, is an extraordinary epic examining the conditions that led to the rise of the Marcos regime in 1970s Philippines.

A bracingly original debut, filmmaker Benjamin Crotty uses the tragicomic plight of a frail young man stranded at a military outpost amid a lascivious band of army wives to craft a queer soap opera for the ages.

A university professor espouses the role of muses in art and literature as a means of romancing his students in this breathtaking new film from the acclaimed director of In the City of Sylvia.

A stunning, dreamlike debut, a country doctor's search for an abandoned child takes him to a mysterious place where past, present and future become one.

In only his second feature, Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa (Horse Money) brilliantly reworked Jacques Tourneur's classic I Walked with a Zombie into a reflection on his country’s colonial legacy. Never before released in the U.S. and now beautifully restored.

A film director falls for a young painter - twice - in this acclaimed masterpiece from celebrated filmmaker Hong Sangsoo.

A film of brilliant, nocturnal beauty from renowned painter and artist Wilhem Sasnal, and his wife, Anka Sasnal.

A story of marital intrigue and betrayal set against the backdrop of the Persian New Year from the Academy Award winning director of A Separation.