Eternal punk icon Kim Gordon’s kaleidoscopic career in music, film, fashion and visual art reflects her intuitive indie sensibility. Gordon’s impeccable cinematic connections include collaborations with Olivier Assayas, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, Alex Ross Perry and Gus Van Sant.

Kim Gordon

Kristen Stewart is on spellbinding form in this offbeat Parisian art-house ghost story, a hasty reunion with CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (2014) director Olivier Assayas, who wrote the lead role especially for her. Stewart plays Maureen, a downtrodden personal assistant to a bitchy supermodel, whose lonely life on the sidelines of the glamor industry takes an intriguingly eerie turn following a family bereavement. Both director and star keep viewers guessing with subtle shifts in tone and register, creating an alluring blend of spooky highbrow genre exercise and psychological thriller. PERSONAL SHOPPER won multiple awards, with Assayas sharing Best Director prize at Cannes.

Personal Shopper

Swedish director Göran Hugo Olsson’s archive-heavy documentary condenses hundred of hours of vintage 16mm footage from an incendiary period in American history, originally filmed by Swedish television crews and then largely forgotten for more than 30 years. Featuring interviews with radical icons like Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE covers the birth of the Black Panthers, anti–Vietnam War protests, the Attica prison riots, the devastating effect of heroin in Black communities and more. Featuring a superb soundtrack, plus contemporary commentary from Davis, Questlove, Erykah Badu and others, Olsson’s cinematic history lesson is rich, fascinating and admirably complex.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

Combining fierce beauty with prickly personal emotion, writer-director Claire Denis draws on her own childhood in French colonial Africa to craft this masterful, politically charged thriller. Isabelle Huppert burns up the screen as Maria Vial, a coffee plantation boss in an unnamed African country who stubbornly ignores the bloody civil war erupting around her as she fights to bring in the latest harvest. Featuring strong supporting performances from Christophe Lambert as Maria’s shifty ex-husband and Isaach De Bankolé as a charismatic rebel fighter, WHITE MATERIAL examines the lingering wounds of colonialism through a refreshingly complex lens, devoid of cartoon villains or glib solutions.

White Material

Infamous in his native South Korea for provocation and controversy, director Im Sang-soo’s prizewinning erotic thriller is a lethally intoxicating cocktail of sex, glamor, class and power dynamics. Iron-willed maid Eun-yi (Jeon Do-yeon) is hired to work for a superrich couple, businessman Hoon (Lee Jung-jae) and his pregnant wife, Haera (Woo Seo). But Hoon’s sexual advances toward Eun-yi ignite a war between servants and masters that spirals into an orgy of bloody revenge. THE HOUSEMAID is a loose remake of Kim Ki-young’s 1960 film of the same name, a Korean cult classic and key influence on Bong Joon Ho’s PARASITE.

The Housemaid

Driven by knockout performances from Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz, CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA is a highly atmospheric behind-the-scenes psychodrama written and directed by Olivier Assayas with a knowing nod to Fassbinder. Binoche plays a superstar actress sequestered on a remote alpine retreat while she weighs up an offer to revive one of her career-making stage plays—this time in the older female role. Stewart co-stars as the personal assistant who works as the diva’s counselor, confidante and sometime sparring partner. Cast and crew won multiple prizes, including a César for Stewart, the first female American to earn the honor.

Clouds of Sils Maria

Painting an affectionate insider portrait of the rarefied, precarious workings of European indie filmmaking, French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve is clearly working from personal experience in this fine-grained, tragicomic family drama. Louis-Do de Lencquesaing stars as Grégoire Canvel, a flamboyant film producer whose fondness for uncompromising art-house projects has left him with huge debts. He also has many other dark secrets, as his wife Sylvia (Chiara Caselli) and daughter Clémence (Alice de Lencquesaing) discover following his shock exit. Hansen-Løve based Grégoire Canvel on Humbert Balsan, who discussed producing her debut feature before taking his own life in 2005.

Father of My Children

Paris is purgatory in BASTARDS, a relentlessly bleak contemporary thriller which plunges French director Claire Denis deep into film noir territory. Drawing on William Faulkner’s controversial 1931 novel SANCTUARY, this dark revenge saga stars Vincent Lindon as Marco, a landlocked sea captain investigating his brother-in-law’s apparent suicide. In defending his sister, Sandra (Julie Bataille), and niece, Justine (Lola Créton), against reptilian businessman Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor), Marco is sucked into a nightmarish netherworld of betrayal, incest and sexual violence. Shooting in digital for the first time, Denis wrings harrowing performances from a strong ensemble cast, carefully avoiding lurid melodrama.

Bastards

After a run of more controversial, sexually explicit films, director Catherine Breillat took an outwardly more conventional turn with this sumptuous historical romp about a 19th-century Parisian libertine (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) torn between his hot-blooded Spanish mistress (Asia Argento) and his virginal new bride (Roxane Mesquida). But the veteran provocatrice of French cinema has little time for convention, transforming a costume drama into a no-costume melodrama full of bodice-ripping lust, gender-twisting power games and lingering female-gaze shots of Aattou’s ripe, androgynous beauty. Freely adapted from Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s scandalous 1851 novel, THE LAST MISTRESS takes carnal pleasure in its juicy perversions and dangerous liaisons.

The Last Mistress

Samantha Morton gives a magnetic star performance in Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s prizewinning second feature, a playful suspense drama based on Alan Warner’s cult novel. Morton plays the eponymous antiheroine, a frustrated young woman who steals her dead boyfriend’s unpublished novel, calmly passing it off as her own work as she embarks on a hedonistic road trip to Spain with best friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott). With its time-scrambled, loopy rhythms and cleverly integrated mixtape soundtrack, MORVERN CALLAR is a highly original work of uncompromising beauty. Coming after RATCATCHER (1999), it confirmed Ramsay as a major new cinematic voice.

Morvern Callar

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

Curated by Kim Gordon

From Kim’s Film Collection

Additional References