Rachel Kushner

Ed Lachman

Kitty Green

Taylor Russell

Mike Mills

Annemarie Jacir

Bryan Fogel

Kim Gordon

Duke Johnson

Pablo Larraín

Karyn Kusama

Chai Vasarhelyi

Andrew Haigh

Ethan Hawke

Lukas Dhont

Sophie de Rakoff

Sebastián Lelio

Ari Wegner

James Gray

Kimberly Peirce

Reinaldo Marcus Green

Married directing duo Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (a Galerie curator) and Jimmy Chin first met while working together on this visually spectacular, award-winning documentary, which chronicles a perilous attempt by Chin and his fellow climbers to scale the towering Shark’s Fin rock face of Meru Peak in northern India. MERU is an immersive, adrenaline-pumping thrill ride, thanks not just to its majestic scenery but also its close-up examination of the compulsive risk-taking that almost proves fatal for several of the climbers. Vasarhelyi and Chin have since collaborated on numerous acclaimed features including Oscar-winner FREE SOLO (2018), THE RESCUE (2021) and NYAD (2023).

Meru

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

When a famed fisherman vanishes, the townsfolk of a Galician seaside village become catatonic. Composed mostly in lengthy static shots of single characters staring into the abyss, the film depicts their whispering voice-overs alternately blaming the disappearance on witches, a local sea monster and finally, shrouded apparitions. Could this be an apocalyptic curse, or a portent of environmental disaster? Director Lois Patiño casts a spell with oceanic sound design and mythic landscape. 

Red Moon Tide

Top 10: Nature as Character

Pixar's Unlikely Rival

Lol Crawley: The Environmentalist

A monthly chat on what we're watching, what we're loving and what we can't wait to see

FIRST FRIDAYS

THE TALE OF KING CRAB

Framing Motherhood

WRITING WITH FIRE

NIGHT MOVES

NON-FICTION

Five Low-Budget Triumphs

GODS OF MEXICO

THE STATE OF MOVIES

A lyrical coming-of-age drama spiced with fantasy interludes, Hungarian auteur István Szabó’s charming second feature takes place in postwar Budapest. Growing up fatherless, Takó (Dániel Erdély) dreams up romantic stories about his late dad’s heroic exploits, but the older Takó (András Bálint) reassesses his views on fatherhood and the fatherland following his relationship with a Jewish girl and involvement with the bloody Hungarian uprising of 1956. Handsomely shot by cinematographer Sándor Sára, Father is a meditation on grief, love and national memory.

Father

An impressionistic portrait of a largely African American community in Alabama, filmed over half a decade in the 2010s, director RaMell Ross’s nonfiction feature debut subverts convention by allowing its subjects to shape the narrative with a collective, multi-person viewpoint. With creative input from Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Laura Poitras, this poignant, sporadically transcendent documentary won multiple accolades, including an Oscar nomination and a prestigious Peabody Award. 

Hale County This Morning, This Evening

Playful and occasionally provocative, veteran Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth turns his sardonic eye on his homeland in this supremely charming short documentary shot in the ’70s. A collage of interviews with almost 100 Danes, from politicians to actors, young mothers to athletes, the film was intended as a challenge to negative clichés about the small Nordic nation as a dull backwater. As usual with Leth, the irony runs deep, drawing deadpan humor from willfully mundane material.

Life in Denmark

István Szabó’s LOVEFILM was and remains revolutionary for its time: a love story that spans decades, about a pair of childhood friends in Hungary who are reunited as adults in Paris. The result is tender, sharp and political: It’s easy to see both Szabó’s European New Wave influences and his impact on future directors like Paweł Pawlikowski. LOVEFILM is equal parts intellectual and artful, brimming with passion and simmering with grief.

Lovefilm

Danish director, author and visual artist Jørgen Leth’s compact masterpiece is a gently surreal, satirical commentary on the human condition. Meticulously framed in crisp monochrome shots, this 13-minute gem is pitched as a quasi-anthropological snapshot of a young couple performing everyday tasks in a blank interior space. The film enjoyed a profile boost when fellow Dane Lars von Trier challenged Leth to shoot multiple remakes for their experimental collaboration THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS (2003).

The Perfect Human

The Rube Goldberg–ian work by Swiss conceptual artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss elicits basic joy from sophisticated connections. “There’s just something very punk about that movie,”  Mike says.

The Way Things Go

Kimberly Peirce’s debut feature BOYS DON’T CRY hinges on a pivotal love scene. Up to the point of making that film in 1999, the director had not seen many authentic depictions of queer intimacy on film. Informed by core film references, including the heterosexual power dynamics of Federico Fellini’s 8½ and Hal Ashby’s COMING HOME, she created an original moment that felt true to her characters' own identities and love story.

The Scene: Boys Don't Cry

Kitty breaks down the Human Resources scene from her 2019 film THE ASSISTANT, explaining how the exchange between a low-level female employee and male company rep was influenced by current events and deep research, as well as by Michael Haneke’s 2001 film THE PIANO TEACHER. Shouting out the performances of actors Julia Garner and Matthew MacFadyen, she discusses the process of transforming a generic corporate encounter into a nuanced exploration of power dynamics in the workplace—and beyond.

The Scene: The Assistant

Revisiting the begonia fields in Belgium where his 2022 coming-of-age film was shot, Lukas details the production process behind the flower-planting scenes.

The Scene: Close

“A film only works if there is something underneath that is saying something a little bit deeper than what's on the surface.” Reflecting on his career journey, Andrew unpacks his childhood film inspirations and explains how they informed the directing choices for his 2023 feature, ALL OF US STRANGERS.

Andrew Haigh The Scene: All of Us Strangers

Strong Roots

Adolescence in One Take

Coppola's Conservationist

Morocco's Dissident Filmmakers

Senegalese musical superstar, activist and occasional politician Youssou N’Dour is the subject of this engaging documentary from future Oscar-winning director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. N’Dour is widely celebrated as one of Africa’s prime cultural ambassadors on the world stage, but this film chronicles the scandal around his 2004 album EGYPT, a Grammy-winning hit in the U.S. that was boycotted in Senegal for controversially blending music with devotional lyrics steeped in Sufi Islam. Following the singer on tour at home and abroad, Vasarhelyi delivers a rich musical feast, but she also touches on deeper fault lines running through the post-9/11 geopolitical landscape.

Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love

Playing like a real-life true-crime thriller, Oscar-winning director Bryan Fogel’s gripping documentary chronicles the gruesome killing of exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018, a Mafia-style execution seemingly ordered by the kingdom’s ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Adding emotional depth and forensic detail to a widely reported news story, THE DISSIDENT features interviews with key players in this harrowing case of state-sponsored murder, including Khashoggi’s bereaved fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, and former CIA chief John O. Brennan. Fogel also widens his focus to profile other brave media campaigners challenging the Saudi regime’s bloodthirsty censorship war against its critics.

The Dissident

Artfully shot to resemble a raw reportage documentary, Annemarie Jacir’s career-making graduation thesis short is a thriller about the everyday struggles of Palestinians. Reem Abu-Sbaih plays a fictionalized version of Jacir, a tenacious film director leading a small team on a taxi journey from the West Bank to Jerusalem, their plans disrupted by roadblocks, detours and hostile military interrogations. Part gritty drama, part visual poem, LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES won multiple prizes while making history as the first short from the Arab world—and the first film by a Palestinian female director—to be selected for the Cannes Film Festival.

Like Twenty Impossibles

An austere but strikingly beautiful drama about grief, crime, poverty and broken families in the Mississippi Delta, BALLAST is the highly assured debut feature of writer-director Lance Hammer. Micheal J. Smith Sr. plays Lawrence, a man wrestling with suicidal depression following his twin brother’s death, which forces him into a complicated reconciliation with his sister-in-law (Tarra Riggs) and her 12-year-old son (JimMyron Ross). A terrific cast, mostly Black and non-professional, helped improvise their own characters and dialogue from Hammer’s spare script. This humane, quietly powerful family saga won the Best Directing and Best Cinematography awards at Sundance.

Ballast

A highly original hybrid of documentary, staged drama and experimental essay-film, THE ARBOR pays moving tribute to the British social-realist playwright Andrea Dunbar, who died in 1990 at the tragically young age of 29. Shooting in Dunbar’s impoverished neighborhood in the northern English city of Bradford, director Clio Barnard uses both professional actors and local amateurs to voice verbatim audio interviews by the writer, her family, friends and colleagues. Barnard’s absorbing film also includes restaged scenes from Dunbar’s semi-autobiographical plays, which address issues of class inequality, racism and sexism with a bleak but darkly funny sensibility.

The Arbor

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

Distant echoes of Dostoyevsky ripple through Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s chilly crime drama set in a contemporary Moscow that appears lawless, godless and hopeless. The legendary Nadezhda Markina plays a middle-aged nurse facing a desperate dilemma, even contemplating murder to help her impoverished family. As with Zvyagintsev’s other work, from THE RETURN (2003) to LEVIATHAN (2014), this elegantly somber Cannes prizewinner couches bleak social commentary in lyrical beauty.

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