Ruiz’s longstanding interest in Racine culminated in this visually stunning, strange, and ghostlike adaptation of one of the French playwright’s best-known tragedies, in which a Roman emperor under public pressure declines to marry the Palestinian queen he loves. New restoration!

Ulmer’s influence on Ruiz is conspicuous throughout his oeuvre, and no film seems to have left a more indelible mark on Ruiz’s imagination than this hallucinatory and macabre 1934 horror/thriller, in which an American novelist and his wife find themselves held captive in the haut modernist mansion of a Satan-worshipping Austrian architect (Boris Karloff).

Propelled by a ferocious creative energy and blending folk legends, surrealist poetry, children’s adventure stories, and Hollywood horror movies, City of Pirates follows a decidedly nonlinear narrative about a sleepwalking virgin, a ten-year-old boy who claims to have raped and murdered his entire family, and the lone inhabitant of an island castle. An NYFF23 selection

Ruiz had hardly lived a month in Paris—the city where he’d been forced to relocate by the Pinochet coup in 1974—when he began this ironic, unsentimental depiction of the city’s tense and divided exile community. New restoration!

This nutty fantasy of murder and identity-swapping—starring Melvil Poupaud as a man accused of killing his aunt, Catherine Deneuve both as the victim of the crime and the murderer’s defense lawyer, and Michel Piccoli as the leader of a fringe psychoanalytic society—is a kind of index of Ruiz’s obsessions as a filmmaker.

Raúl Ruiz’s first film made in the U.S. freely borrows from American police dramas and telenovelas in transforming downtown New York into a phantasmagorical labyrinth of noirish intrigues, inexplicable menace, and metaphysical quagmires.

The film that arguably put Ruiz on the map was this beguiling art-historical whatsit—an investigation, co-written by Pierre Klossowski, into the connections between a series of paintings (conjured through painstaking tableaux vivants) by the unheralded 19th-century French painter Frédéric Tonnerre and human sacrifices carried out by a Baphometic cult.

Prepared by Ruiz from a screenplay by Carlos Saboga (Mysteries of Lisbon), Lines of Wellington was completed by Sarmiento—Ruiz’s longtime editor as well as his widow—who has created a revealing portrait of life during the Peninsular War. An NYFF50 Selection.

This deliriously diffuse collage of nine stories involving doubt-wracked theology students, magic mirrors, talismanic paintings, and marauding pirates—all but one set in the 17th or 18th centuries—showed Ruiz returning to the cluttered and hugely exuberant imaginative territory he’d taken up in the 1980s.

With this four-and-a-half-hour-long adaptation of a novel by the 19th-century Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco—a densely peopled story of intrigue, murder, elopement, and disguise, set against the backdrop of Portugal’s 1820 revolution—Ruiz had the space to tell a story of breathtaking complexity that nonetheless kept its shape. An NYFF48 selection.

Initially conceived as a television miniseries and seen by many as Ruiz’s late career ode to the country he was forced to leave in the early 1970s, the epic La Recta Provincia finds a mother and son caught in a demonic wild goose chase as chilling as it is humorous and constructed with stories within stories.

Much is debated about the provenance of Wim Wenders’s depiction of a film shoot on the edge of collapse, which he made on the set of Ruiz’s The Territory. Did Wenders collaborate with Ruiz or hijack his production? Either way, the result was a bracing and fascinating vision of moviemaking as chaos and confusion. New restoration!

For what he considered his first French movie, Ruiz transformed a 1950 novel by the French writer Pierre Klossowski about quarrels within the Catholic church into a dense metafictional experiment comprising two overlapping films-within-the-film. New restoration!

Perhaps the only Raúl Ruiz film that could be described as containing a story “ripped from the headlines,” this philosophical horror flick (co-written by Gilbert Adair) tracks the descent of two American families into cannibalism during a camping trip in the south of France.

Ruiz’s dazzling opium dream of a film, Three Crowns of the Sailor is centered on an encounter between a student who has just committed a brutal murder and a drunken sailor who persuades the scared youth to accompany him to a nearby dance hall and listen to his macabre life story.

In this idiosyncratic puzzle film, Mastroianni gave his penultimate performance as three different characters: a married man who abandons his wife, a lecturer at the Sorbonne who becomes a beggar, and a mysterious butler. Or are they all the same man? New restoration!

Ruiz’s lively debut, composed under the sign of the French New Wave and Cassavetes, follows the hustles of a group of small-timers striving to carve out a living in the seedy underworld of pre-Allende Santiago.

Unfortunately, the December 3rd screening has been canceled due to an issue with the print. We will be contacting ticket holders about refunds or exchanges.

Treasure Island is less an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s book than a set of imaginative variations on the themes it suggests. In Ruiz’s vision, young Jim lives in a seaside inn populated by mysterious figures and intruders—a situation that sets the stage for an odd experiment in storytelling carried out by a cabal of feuding grownups.