Winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Chinonye Chukwu’s sophomore feature is an enthralling prison-set drama anchored by powerhouse performances by Alfre Woodard and Aldis Hodge.

In Alejandro Landes’s intensely thrilling twist on Lord of the Flies, Julianne Nicholson plays a terrorized American engineer held captive by teenage guerilla bandits in an unnamed South American jungle. A Sundance award-winner, Monos is sure to be one of the most hotly debated films of 2019.

A double prizewinner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Pippa Bianco’s unnerving feature debut is a profound and powerful examination of sexual assault and the increasingly volatile role the Internet plays in contemporary American society.

Aenne Schwarz delivers a gut-wrenching performance as a woman dealing with the aftermath of a nightmarish evening in Eva Trobisch’s poised and formally restrained directorial debut.

Based on historical fact, Angelo charts the career of an African man sold into 18th-century Viennese court society and rises to become the beloved Court Moor of the Habsburg empire—before being banished to a horrifying, dehumanizing fate.

Mark Jenkin’s tale of tensions between two brothers in a Cornish fishing village is an idiosyncratic work of social realism (shot on hand-processed black-and-white 16mm) fascinatingly pitched somewhere between documentary and political melodrama.

A murder investigation is flipped inside out in Burak Cevik’s second feature, a spellbinding and surprising film concerning the first encounter of a young couple accused of murder.

In her debut, theater director Lila Avilés turns the monotonous work day of Eve (Gabriela Cartol), a chambermaid at a high-end Mexico City hotel, into a beautifully observed film of rich detail.

What seems like a one-night encounter between two strangers becomes an epic, decades-spanning relationship, which filmmaker Lucio Castro depicts in a nonlinear fashion, and in which time and space refuse to play by the rules.

The debut film from María Alché—best known for her mesmerizing performance in Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl—is a hallucinatory, fragmented narrative evoking the interior life of a middle-aged wife and mother of three who’s set adrift by the death of her sister.

The legend of Faust mingles with local folklore in Andrea Bussmann’s strikingly original shape-shifter, a film that dissolves the boundaries between the visible and the invisible.

Following his autobiographical 2015 debut The Demons, Philippe Lesage continues to chronicle the life of young Felix (Édouard Tremblay-Grenier), and also captures the romantic trials and tribulations of two Quebecois teen siblings; the result is one of the most beautiful coming-of-age stories in years.

In an abandoned Macedonian village, Hatidze tends to her precious bee colonies while also caring for her ailing elderly mother; her life is upended by the invasion of thankless new neighbors in this evocative, often outrageously funny modern-day parable of the Good Samaritan.

A staggering work of compassionate realism, Sudabeh Mortezai’s second fiction feature follows a young Nigerian sex worker living in Vienna as she struggles to simultaneously create a better life for her family and pay off her madame.

Winner of the top prize at last year’s Locarno Film Festival, Yeo Siew Hua’s third feature is a clever, evocative shape-shifter concerning the curious case of a missing Chinese construction worker.

A work of enveloping atmosphere, Ognjen Glavonić’s wintry road movie concerns a truck driver tasked with transporting mysterious cargo from Kosovo to Belgrade during the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. A New Directors/New Films 2019 selection. A Grasshopper Film release.

The everyday takes on a profound and touching resonance in André Novais Oliveira’s sophomore feature concerning a woman who moves from her hometown of Itaúnas to Contagem to take a job working in a public health program.

Cinematographer Phuttiphong Arronpheng’s auspicious directorial debut is a mysterious, intoxicating work that centers on the friendship between a fisherman and the mute refugee he rescues from a swamp.

Arguably the most exhilarating documentary to come out of Sundance this year, Midnight Family follows the private “operations” of the Ochoa family, who race to the scene of an accident or a crime to fill the void of government-run ambulances in Mexico City.

In Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell’s clever comedy, a young woman (Campbell) visits Harvard University to research a correspondence between her great-grandmother (a renowned Polish poet) and another poet who seems to have been her lover. Screening with The Plagiarist.

Co-written by experimental filmmakers James N. Kienitz Wilkins and Robin Schavoir, The Plagiarists is at once a hilarious send-up of low-budget American indie filmmaking and a provocative inquiry into relationships, race panic, and the social uncanny. A New Directors/New Films 2019 selection. A KimStim release.

Shengze Zhu’s third feature shines a light on the curious world of live-streaming, a singularly contemporary form of human connection and commerce wherein “anchors” document their lives and interact with a virtual audience.

Seething with a feral energy that masks genuine tenderness, Sauvage makes vivid a gay street hustler’s knife’s-edge existence, roaming from john to john in search of a fix—in the form of sex, drugs, and possibly even love.

In Qiu Sheng’s entrancing, enigmatic feature debut, a team of surveyors investigates an inexplicably subsiding suburban landscape while a group of children set out on youthful adventures.

Featuring Big Bridge by Simón Vélez López, Hector Malot: The Last Day of the Year by Jacqueline Lentzou, Misericórdia by Xavier Marrades, A Million Years by Danech San, and Echoes by Lucila Mariani.

Featuring The Golden Legend by Chema García Ibarra and Ion de Sosa, Past Perfect by Jorge Jácome, Altiplano by Malena Szlam, and America by Garrett Bradley.