Joel Coen’s boldly inventive visualization of The Scottish Play is an anguished film that stares, mouth agape, at a sorrowful world undone by blind greed and thoughtless ambition, starring a strikingly inward Denzel Washington as the man who would be king and an effortlessly Machiavellian Frances McDormand as his Lady.

Jane Campion reaffirms her status as one of the world’s greatest—and most gratifyingly eccentric—filmmakers with this mesmerizing, psychologically rich variation on the American western, in which a melancholy young widow (Kirsten Dunst) on a Montana cattle ranch in the 1920s is tormented by her new husband’s sullen and bullying brother (Benedict Cumberbatch).

Two women, a generation apart, find themselves inextricably linked by their brief time together in a maternity ward, bound by a secret with ties to a deep trauma in Spanish history. Charismatic stars inhabit characters who are singular among those drawn by Almodóvar in a career defined by striking portraits of women.

A rising star of a resurgent Italian cinema, Jonas Carpignano continues his deeply felt project of observing life in contemporary Calabria with this gripping character study of a teenage girl, Chiara (a revelatory Swamy Rotolo), who gradually comes to discover that her close-knit family is not all that it seems.

A film of radical style and splenetic anger, Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid’s shattering follow-up to his bat-out-of-hell Synonyms accompanies a celebrated but increasingly dissociated director to a small town in the desert region of Arava for a screening of his latest film; here he descends into a spiral of rage aimed at the Israeli government.

In his angry, gleefully graceless Berlinale Golden Bear winner, Radu Jude crafts an invigorating, infuriating film in three movements centering around the trials of a teacher (Katia Pascariu) at a prestigious Bucharest school whose life and job are upended when her husband accidentally uploads their private sex tape to the internet.

Based on true events, Benedetta unearths the story of Benedetta Carlini, a 17th-century nun who believed she saw visions of Christ and engaged in a sexual relationship with a fellow sister at her abbey; this delirious, erotic, and violent melodrama is told with a boundless spirit for scandal, and unabashedly courts blasphemy.

A masterful blend of the personal and the meta-cinematic, Mia Hansen-Løve’s meditation on the reconciliation of love and the creative process casts Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth as married filmmakers who venture to the remote Swedish island of Fårö, where director Ingmar Bergman lived and made many of his masterpieces.

Michelangelo Frammartino’s long-awaited first feature in a decade, following Le Quattro Volte, is another work of nearly wordless natural beauty that touches on the mystical, based on the true adventures of a group of young speleologists who in 1961 descended into a hole in the mountains of Calabria to explore what was then the third-deepest known cave on Earth.

Inspired by a Haruki Murakami short story, Hamaguchi spins an engrossing, expansive epic about love and betrayal, grief and acceptance, charting the unexpected, complex relationships that a theater actor-director forges with a trio of people out of professional, physical, or psychological necessity.

In his provocative and direct new documentary, Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi, acting as his own on-screen narrator, very specifically and pointedly asks what are the circumstances, logic, and day-to-day processes that have allowed the normalization of Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territories.

This illuminating and heartrending animated documentary tells the true story of Amin, whose life has been defined by escape: first from Afghanistan, then from post-Soviet Russia. Now planning to marry a man he met in his new homeland, Denmark, Amin begins to look back over his life, opening up about his past, his trauma, the truth about his family, and his own sexuality.

Léa Seydoux brilliantly holds the center of Bruno Dumont’s unexpected, unsettling new film as France de Meurs, an unflappable superstar TV journalist whose career, homelife, and psychological stability are shaken after she carelessly drives into a young delivery man on a busy Paris street.

A collective of three Italian filmmakers known for their politically acute cinema—Pietro Marcello (Martin Eden), Francesco Munzi (Black Souls), and Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro)—revealingly interview a cross-section of their nation’s youth about their hopes, dreams, and fears for the future.

A minor-key symphony of inscrutable glances and irresolvable tensions, the Zürcher brothers’ alternately droll and melancholy film charts a few days in the lives of two young people on the verge of change: Lisa, who is in the process of moving into a new apartment, and her current roommate, Mara, who’s staying behind.

The son of acclaimed, embattled Iranian master filmmaker Jafar Panahi makes a striking feature debut with this charming, sharp-witted, and ultimately deeply moving comic drama that takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns.

After years of living abroad, a middle-aged former actress (Lee Hye-young) has returned to South Korea to reconnect with her past and perhaps make amends in Hong Sangsoo’s beguiling and oddly cleansing mix of the spiritual and the cynical.

Leading Romanian filmmaker Radu Muntean knowingly plays off and subverts conventions of horror films and social realist drama as he follows a trio of well-meaning aid workers from Bucharest on a food delivery mission to the rural hinterlands of the Întregalde area of Transylvania, where they find themselves trapped.

In this complexly structured puzzle box of unpredictable, poignant human behavior, a group of characters—most crucially parents and their grown offspring—try to relate to one another via a series of thwarted or stunted meetings and introductions, centered around a young man (Shin Seok-ho) on the cusp of adulthood.

In the grandest yet most becalmed of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s works, Jessica (Tilda Swinton), an expat botanist visiting her hospitalized sister in Bogotá, becomes ever more disturbed by an abyssal sound that haunts her sleepless nights and bleary-eyed days. It’s a personal journey that’s also historical excavation, yielding a film of profound serenity.

Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision co-directed with Anisia Uzeyman, a sci-fi punk musical that takes place amidst the hilltops of Burundi, where a collective of computer hackers emerges from within a coltan mining community.

A cornerstone work of Harlem Renaissance literature, Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing is adapted to the screen with exquisite craft and skill by writer-director Rebecca Hall, and features meticulous performances by Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as reacquainted childhood friends whose lives have taken divergent paths.

Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) proves again that she’s among the most accomplished and unpredictable of all contemporary French filmmakers with the gentle yet richly emotional time-bender Petite Maman, concerning 8-year-old Nelly’s complicated response to the death of her grandmother.

In her delicately wrought yet devastating first fiction feature, adapted from the 2014 book by Jennifer Clement, Tatiana Huezo naturalistically chronicles the growth of young Ana, who lives in a mountainous town in rural Mexico gripped by fear of the drug cartels who ruthlessly control the region.

Continuing the remarkable autobiographical saga she had begun in 2019, British director Joanna Hogg—a filmmaker of unceasing visual ingenuity and sociological specificity—creates a film about finding one’s artistic inspiration and individuality that avoids every possible cliché.

The winner of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or, Titane is a thrillingly confident vision from Julia Ducournau that begins as a work of intense horror and ends as something else: a film that questions our assumptions about gender, family, and love itself.

Kira Kovalenko won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes for this vivid, concentrated rendering of one woman’s desperate, almost bestial need to escape from her suffocating family life in North Ossetia, located in the Caucasus region of Southern Russia.

Combining contemporary interviews and archival documentation of The Velvet Underground with a trove of avant-garde film from their era, Todd Haynes constructs a vibrant cinematic collage that is as much about New York of the ’60s and ’70s as it is about the rise and fall of the seminal band.

Finding new depths of tenderness without forgoing the uncompromising fatalism that defines his work, Gaspar Noé guides us through a handful of dark days in the lives of an elderly couple in Paris: a retired psychiatrist (Françoise Lebrun) and a writer (Dario Argento) working on a book about the intersection of cinema and dreams.

Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze has created an intimate city symphony like no other with his new film, which starts out as an off-kilter romance between footballer Giorgi and pharmacist Lisa and continues to radically and pleasurably shape-shift, ultimately becoming a lovely, idiosyncratic portrait of an entire urban landscape.

In this rapturous, altogether delightful triptych of stories, a lively and intricately woven work of imagination that questions whether fate or our own vanities decide our destinies, Hamaguchi again proves he’s one of contemporary cinema’s most agile dramatists of modern love and obsession.

Acclaimed Norwegian director Joachim Trier catapults the viewer into the world of his most spellbinding protagonist yet: Julie (the magnetic Renate Reinsve), a med-school dropout navigating her twenties and juggling emotionally heavy relationships with two very different men.

In his densely beautiful, eye-popping animated spectacle, Mirai director Mamoru Hosoda tells the exhilarating story of a shy teenager who becomes an online sensation as a magical pop star named Belle in a parallel virtual universe known as the “U.”

A soulful Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a kindhearted radio journalist taking care of his sister’s troubled young son while trying to complete a project in writer-director Mike Mills’s latest effort, another warm, insightful, and gratifyingly askew portrait of American family life.

A mythic and emotionally charged hero’s journey, Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), a brilliant and gifted young man born into a great destiny beyond his understanding in visionary filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal novel.

As brimming with finely tuned texture as a juicy issue of a vintage magazine, The French Dispatch features precision work from a full masthead of collaborators, with director Wes Anderson’s deadpan whimsy complementing the film’s palpable sense of nostalgia.

Charlotte Gainsbourg’s wise and wondrous film about her legendary mother, Jane Birkin, consists of several intimate conversations between parent and child, affording a spare, loving window into the emotional lives of two women as they talk about subject matter that ranges from the delightful to the difficult.

In her striking feature directorial debut, Maggie Gyllenhaal adapts a 2006 novel by Elena Ferrante about Leda (brilliantly played by Oscar-winner Olivia Colman), a divorced professor on a solitary summer vacation who becomes intrigued and then oddly involved in the lives of another family she meets there.

In his most achingly personal film to date, legendary Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio uses the occasion of a family reunion in his hometown of Piacenza to excavate and discuss a traumatic event: the suicide his twin brother Camillo.

Adding to his gallery of jet-fueled portraits of economic hardship within marginalized pockets of the U.S., director Sean Baker trains his restless camera on Mikey, a wildly narcissistic former porn star who has returned from L.A. to his depressed, postindustrial hometown of Texas City.

Joanna Hogg mines her own autobiography to craft a portrait of the artist as a young woman in early 1980s London. An eminently refined and moving bildungsroman about the ties that inexplicably bind, The Souvenir—as its title suggests—is also an absorbing evocation of a time, place, and national mood.

In this beguiling new film co-directed by Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, a daily journal unfolds in revelatory reverse order, surveying the mundane routines of three housemates living in rural peace during the COVID lockdown; soon, we discover that there’s more going on beyond the limits of the camera frame.

A major new voice in nonfiction cinema, Wang Qiong documents with unflinching and harrowing honesty her own fractured family, gradually revealing the personal and psychological effects of China’s one-child policy on the individual, the family unit, and women in society at large.

Kiro Russo has mounted a monumental, gently mystical portrait of the contemporary central South American cityscape and those who work within its bowels and environs, set in the alternately harsh and beautiful terrain of La Paz, Bolivia and its surrounding rural areas.

Kyoshi Sugita creates an evocative portrait of a young woman’s interior world through impressionistic action rather than psychology, fixing his patient camera on meetings with friends, family, and strangers, lunches and teatime, and occurrences both mundane and mystical.

A precise, enveloping portrait of the complex romantic relationship between epochal experimental novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras and her much younger, homosexual partner, Yann Andréa, Claire Simon’s latest film is based entirely on transcripts from a 1982 interview between Andréa (Swann Arlaud) and journalist Michèle Manceaux (Emmanuelle Devos).

Vincent Meessen’s freewheeling yet highly disciplined documentary tells the story of Niger-born artist and Marxist intellectual Omar Blondin Diop, an organizer and communicator of anti-colonialist political theory in France and Senegal who died at 26 in prison after being arrested by the Senegalese government.

Artavazd Peleshian’s first feature film in nearly 30 years is an epic return to his major theme: humanity in harmony and conflict with the natural world. Rendered in stark black and white, Peleshian’s elegant, relentless montage of found disaster videos imparts an overwhelming experience of nature’s vast, destructive processes of regeneration. Screening with Andrei Ujică’s 2 Pasolini, which follows the Italian auteur and his theological advisor, Don Andrea Carraro, on a trip through 1960s Palestine to scout locations for his 1964 biblical masterpiece The Gospel According to Saint Matthew.

Through a series of letters read aloud to an absent lover, we learn about the fears, desires, and philosophical identity of a young woman named L, a student at the Film and Television Institute of India, in writer-director Payal Kapadia’s brilliantly fragmentary film about contemporary Indian youths engaged in the politics of university life.

With his customary mix of narrative restraint and intellectual curiosity, filmmaker Ted Fendt follows a small group of young women through Berlin and Vienna over the course of several months, particularly Daniela, who has just returned from traveling in New York and is dealing with a bout of insomnia.

The lighting for movie cameras has always been calibrated for white skin; three filmmakers collectively explore the literal, theoretical, and philosophical dimensions of that reality in this discursive, playful, and profound work of nonfiction.

In just over 80 minutes, filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot provides a fleet, thorough, and incisive sociological examination of the French working class over the past 70 years, using decades’ worth of artfully deployed archival footage, film clips, and TV news reports to illustrate the rise, fall, and hopeful rebirth of the country’s proletariat, as well as how social identity is gradually constructed.

Documentarian Shengze Zhu’s becalmed, wordless meditation on the vulnerability and resilience of urban spaces before and after the COVID outbreak intersperses exquisitely composed images of life and hope along the Yangtze River with onscreen text translating letters written to loved ones affected by illness and death.

Mischievous Quebecois filmmaker Denis Côté’s absurdist comedy is constructed as a series of frank and often hilarious repartees between an insolent petty thief named Antonin and a succession of largely fed-up women, keeping a pandemic-worthy and humorous distance from one another as they verbally parry and thrust in static long takes.

In her evocative, collage-like 16mm film, Rhayne Vermette immerses the viewer in the sounds, textures, and atmosphere of her native Manitoba to limn the outer edges of a twilight-toned narrative centering on a long-missing young woman’s unexpected return to her indigenous Métis community.

Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s rousing, bifurcated tale follows the improbable adventures of Luciano (a bewitching Gabriele Silli), a village outcast in late-19th-century rural Italy, whose life is undone by indulgence, leading him to hunt for a mythic treasure in the distant Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego.

Featuring Zhang Dalei’s Day Is Done, Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand’s 38, Luise Donschen’s ELLE, and Lois Patiño and Matías Piñeiro’s Sycorax.

Featuring Tiffany Sia’s Do Not Circulate, Christopher Harris’s Dreams Under Confinement, Eliane Esther Bots’s In Flow of Words, Haig Aivazian’s All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes, and Virgil Vernier’s Kindertotenlieder.

Featuring Justin Jinsoo Kim’s Personality Test, Aykan Safoğlu’s Dog Star Descending, Pablo Martín Weber’s Homage to the Work of Philip Henry Gosse, and Guillermo Moncayo’s (No Subject).

Featuring Vika Kirchenbauer’s THE CAPACITY FOR ADEQUATE ANGER, Morgan Quaintance’s A Human Certainty, and Carl Elsaesser’s Home When You Return.

Featuring Mike Crane’s Cutting the Mushroom, Ross Meckfessel’s Estuary, Zachary Epcar’s The Canyon, and Ericka Beckman’s Reach Capacity.

Featuring Rhea Storr’s Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical, Miranda Pennell’s Strange Object, Shireen Seno’s To Pick a Flower, and Morgan Quaintance’s South.

Featuring Kevin Jerome Everson’s May June July, Allison Chhorn’s Blind Body, Hope Strickland’s If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever), Shun Ikezoe’s What is it that you said?, Richard Tuohy’s In and Out a Window, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Night Colonies.

Featuring Daïchi Saïto’s earthearthearth, Los Ingrávidos’s Tonalli, Manuela de Laborde’s Fictions, and Tomonari Nishikawa’s Six Seventy-Two Variations, Variation 1.

Mészáros brings her documentary background to bear on this masterful parable about female self-actualization in 1970s Hungary, the winner of the Golden Bear at the 1975 Berlinale.

Carpenter’s taut L.A.-set thriller chronicles the efforts of a small group of cops, administrators, and crooks holed up in a decommissioned police station to survive the night when a merciless street gang shows up seeking revenge.

Menkes’s visionary third feature is a fragmentary and hallucinatory investigation into the psychic currents underlying a Gulf War veteran’s apparent murder of his wife.

The psychodrama of Bela Bartok and Bela Balázs’s expressionist opera based on the Bluebeard folktale is vividly evoked in Michael Powell’s second-to-last feature sans Pressburger.

The Grand Jury Prize winner at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival, Harris’s debut feature, about a real-life con man, endures as a brilliant satirical examination of the place of race and class in the performance of American social life. Screening with James Baldwin: From Another Place.

One of the most beloved American films of the 1970s, this exquisitely wrought drama from Joan Micklin Silver brilliantly recreates Jewish immigrant life on the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century, and features Carol Kane in a delicate, Oscar-nominated performance.

A poetic work informed by folklore and early cinema alike, key Parallel Cinema director Govindan Aravindan’s Kummatty tells the tale of a trickster “boogeyman” who descends upon a village in Malabar year after year.

Denzel Washington stars opposite Sarita Choudhory in Mira Nair’s second fiction feature, which endures as a seminal screen romance of the 1990s and an incisive examination of race relations.

A sui generis deconstruction of the road movie, Christopher Petit’s Radio On is one of the coolest films of the late 1970s, propelled by an incomparable soundtrack featuring Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Devo, Robert Fripp, and others.

Lynne Ramsay’s brilliant career was launched with this, her debut feature, a raw yet lyrical meditation on childhood set in the 1970s that scours the urban decay of working-class Glasgow to unearth the hopes and dreams of its marginalized residents.

Miklós Jancsó’s breakout film was this spellbinding drama set in the aftermath of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, meditating upon and exalting its characters’ resistance and perseverance in the face of brutal, authoritarian repression.

An unforgettable film portrait of a place (England), a time (the end of the 1970s), and a band (The Clash), Rude Boy is still as cool and galvanizing as it was at its 1980 Berlinale premiere.

A searing, indelible portrait of anti-colonial struggle in 1970s Africa, Sambizanga is a forceful, stirring evocation of the Angolan population’s plight before the revolution and their intensifying political consciousness during it.

Lou Reed and John Cale perform their album dedicated to their late friend and collaborator Andy Warhol in this stripped-down, evocative concert film by legendary cinematographer Ed Lachman.

A frenetic work of restless invention, Melvin Van Peebles’s deeply influential third feature was hailed by no less than Huey Newton as the “first truly revolutionary Black film ever made… [and] presented to us by a Black man.”

A meditation on the race relations, economic forces, and failings of the American legal system that comprised the backdrop for the murder of a Chinese-American automotive engineer in Detroit in 1982, Oscar nominees Choy and Tajima-Peña’s documentary’s documentary remains a stirring, absorbing elegy for justice unserved.