Kim Gordon

Ethan Hawke

Karyn Kusama

Taylor Russell

Duke Johnson

Ari Wegner

Mike Mills

Ed Lachman

Reinaldo Marcus Green

James Gray

Chai Vasarhelyi

Lukas Dhont

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

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.

My Brother's Wedding

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

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

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

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

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

SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION

Monte Hellman’s existential car classic

TWO-LANE BLACKTOP

ALL THAT JAZZ

Na Hong-jin’s police procedural–meets–supernatural horror masterpiece

THE WAILING

Andrea Arnold’s intimate documentary portrait of bovine selfhood

FATHER & LOVEFILM

A hauntingly strange period piece even by director Werner Herzog’s uncompromising standards, this dreamlike fairy tale takes place in 18th-century Bavaria. The citizens of a small mountain town are thrown into panic when the local factory’s glass chief glassblower dies, taking with him the secret of creating precious, magical ruby glass. Meanwhile, a prophet predicts doom for the town, foreshadowing two centuries of industrial revolution, tyranny and war. Herzog famously hypnotized cast members before each scene, which helps explain their blank, trancelike performances. HEART OF GLASS demands patience from viewers but it remains a bizarre, fascinating, sporadically transcendent experiment.

Heart of Glass

Before scoring a global smash hit with PARASITE (2019), Korean writer-director Bong Joon Ho made his international breakthrough with this elevated genre thriller, a pulse-racing creature feature with an edge of biting social critique. Loosely inspired by a real chemical dump in South Korea’s Han River, THE HOST imagines a toxic amphibian monster running rampage through Seoul as a blue-collar family fights to rescue their daughter from its clutches. Featuring future PARASITE star Song Kang-ho, Bong’s politically charged fairy tale features model effects designed by Peter Jackson’s Wētā Workshop.

The Host

A treat for connoisseurs and scholars of American art-house cinema, director Gabe Klinger’s documentary is a freewheeling, discursive, close-up portrait of two very different filmmakers: the stylistically promiscuous Texan auteur Richard Linklater and the older, more experimental, more formally austere Wisconsin native James Benning. Friends and mutual admirers for decades, the pair spend a relaxed week together exploring their shared interests and obsessions, from baseball to deconstructing time onscreen. Klinger deploys archive stills and vintage footage to great effect, teasing out both the common ground and contrasts between these two unique artists.

Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater

Scoring huge transatlantic success in the 1970s, British blues-rock supergroup Bad Company once shared a manager, a record label and a debauched reputation with Led Zeppelin. Narrated by the surviving band members, plus famous friends including Queen guitarist Brian May, director Jon Brewer’s career-spanning documentary is fairly straight but greatly entertaining. Going beyond banal promotional exercise, it gives appropriate space to the dumb excesses, overblown egos and disastrous business decisions alongside the band’s platinum-selling, stadium-filling triumphs.

Bad Company: The Official Authorised 40th Anniversary Documentary

You never totally know what you’ll get with a Quentin Dupieux film. The French director—who also makes music as Mr. Oizo—is known for his signature absurdist work, ranging from a murderous tire (Rubber) to a jacket-loving psychopath (Deerskin) and so much in between. Here, Dupieux sets his murder mystery inside a police station and rarely leaves, exposing the bureaucratic minutiae and laughable (in)competency of his characters, always in over their heads.

Keep an Eye Out

Three small-town drinking buddies search for a stolen lottery ticket with a huge prize attached in writer-director Paul Negoescu’s bittersweet Romanian comedy. Co-stars Dorian Boguță, Dragos Bucur and Alexandru Papadopol not only play the leads but also produced the film through their acting school, offering scene-stealing cameos to dozens of their students. Droll and charming, it’s a refreshingly sunny road movie from a cinematic nation more typically associated with bleak social realism.

Two Lottery Tickets

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

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

While acknowledging that the younger generation can find black-and-white movies to be a slog, Ethan believes that THE LAST PICTURE SHOW—”so poetic, so funny, so unpretentious”—is an excellent starting point.

Ethan Hawke on The Last Picture Show (1971)

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Encore

It was a flop on release, but Buster Keaton’s final feature for his independent production company remains a hugely ambitious spectacle, now rightly regarded as one of the deadpan silent-comedy legend’s greatest masterpieces. Keaton plays the foppish son of a Mississippi River steamboat operator who transforms into an unlikely action hero when a wealthy rival threatens his father’s livelihood. Directed by Charles Reisner, with uncredited help from Keaton, the film climaxes with a dazzling cyclone sequence featuring the star’s most feted and much-quoted stunt. 

Steamboat Bill, Jr.

A young Michael Redgrave lurks among the colorful background chorus of sinister strangers, undercover spies and Nazis in one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best-loved British productions. Margaret Lockwood is the only passenger who suspects foul play after a fellow traveler goes missing from a train crossing Europe on the brink of World War II. The witty blend of caper comedy and mystery thriller secured the director an invitation from producer David O. Selznick to work in Hollywood, where Hitch made many more classics.

The Lady Vanishes

The indelible one-liners (which he committed to memory) of Alex Cox’s REPO MAN taught a young Ethan that this film didn't play by the usual rules: “There aren't many punk rock movies, and that is a punk rock movie.”

Ethan Hawke on Repo Man (1984)

Alex Cox: Iconoclast

After initially rejecting Chantal Akerman’s domestic epic because it was unlike the plot-driven cinema he grew up with, Lukas returned to the film and experienced a revelation. “I started to understand that maybe I wanted to use cinema not to disappear but to confront—to show things that I had struggled with, maybe, in order to try to understand them bit by bit.”

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