Bullet benders! Black magic! Stolen Japanese gold! Four badass Tigers raise hell in Kongkiat Komesiri’s sexy, go-for-broke Thai spaghetti Western.

A young boxer delivers lunchboxes, endures her father’s live-in betrayal, and keeps swinging in Lee Yi-shan’s bruising debut, where Taiwanese family drama steps into the ring.

In NYAFF’s first cine-concert, Tony Bui shapes scenes from across Vietnamese film history into the arc of a single life, set to a live original score from conductor Trần Nhật Minh and violinist Bùi Công Duy. Followed by a discussion and audience Q&A.

Elaine May directed one of the all-time great debut features with this seminal two-hander, tender and cynical in equal measure, starring Walter Matthau as a broke playboy who sets his sights on a wealthy odd-bird botany professor (May) and plans to give her the Bluebeard treatment.

She’s a conservative Mussolini supporter; he’s a homosexual enemy of the state. But after a chance meeting, the two share a life-changing day in 1938 that will challenge their assumptions about people, politics, and sexuality. Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren deliver virtuoso performances.

A stage director’s farewell production turns vicious when his movie-star ex muscles into the lead role. Keane T.K. Wong’s screwball debut, mentored by Derek Yee, stars Stephen Fung, Angela Yuen, Myolie Wu, and Chrissie Chau.

The true conspiracy in James Cameron’s maximalist, hardware-obsessed search-and-destroy war epic lies in the ruthless business calculus of Weyland-Yutani.

Three girls in a dead-end Japanese town dare each other into the kind of get-rich-quick scheme that can only end badly. Takashi Koyama’s acidly funny, teeth-on-edge teen crime story about wanting out of nowhere-Japan stars Sara Minami, Natsuki Deguchi, and Mizuki Yoshida.

On the surface, a nostalgic film about the director’s adolescence, this film—one of Federico Fellini’s and Italian cinema’s masterpieces, and winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film—is also a sweeping anthropological portrait of fascism as a pathology of Italy.

Returning to FLC on a 70mm-blow-up print that hasn’t screened in New York City since its original theatrical run in 1989, Tim Burton’s strangely singular superhero blockbuster fundamentally redefined franchise filmmaking at the same time it imagined the nightmare version of consumer culture.

A Hong Kong housewife secretly signs up for a pole dancing class and suddenly finds she has stories to keep straight, a body to retrain, and a respectability act that is falling apart. Catherine Chau headlines Joey Wu’s bright, nimble comedy.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth, FLC partners with Piper-Heidsieck Champagne for a special archival 35mm screening of Howard Hawks’s classic, followed by a reception with Champagne, hors d’oeuvres, and a fundraiser auction.

Longman Leung’s Cold War blockbuster prequel rewinds to 1994 and old-school Hong Kong cinema, where a tycoon kidnapping unleashes cops, spies, triads, ransom panic, and colonial paranoia in a city changing hands.

Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho returns to zombie cinema with Gianna Jun, a sealed Seoul high-rise, and an outbreak that attacks and adapts. Colony made its world premiere at Cannes before scoring Korea’s biggest local opening of the year.

The 50th Hong Kong Film Festival’s Closing Film, Philip Yung’s follow-up to the heartbreaking Papa centers on a trans woman who leaves mainland China for Hong Kong’s back alleys, falls in love, and explores the dangerous freedom to remake herself.

Joseph Chang stars as a grieving husband searching for the truth behind his pregnant wife’s suicide in Shen Ko-shang’s fiction debut, winner of Best Film and Best Actor at the Pingyao International Film Festival and seven-time Golden Horse Award nominee.

Directed by longtime collaborators Daniel Schmidt and Gabriel Abrantes, this dazzlingly original NYFF56 selection about a chiseled fútbol star who flees the public eye is a perversely pleasurable sendup of Brexit, genetic science, and the ongoing refugee crises.

David Lynch’s Dune remains one of the strangest monuments in American studio filmmaking. Kyle MacLachlan stars as noble heir Paul Atreides, who uncovers an imperial plot engineered to destroy his lineage.

Andy Lau’s mahjong master gets both lucky and cursed—and romantically clobbered by a gloriously volatile Gigi Leung—in Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai’s tile-drunk comedy of bad hands and worse habits. Following the screening, Mahjong Night bundle ticket holders are invited to the Furman Gallery for a spirited game of mahjong!

At an exclusive golf club outside Manila, a teenage tee girl enters a paradise of perfect lawns and polite humiliations. Rafael Manuel’s debut, winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, is a savage satire of capitalism, building suspense from poisonous details.

Game on! Girl power gets a kick in the joystick as Hong Kong’s all-female esports underdogs turn a cha chaan teng diner into a pixel-bright comeback arena.

Three loves, at three ages, in three cities—17 in Macau, 22 in Taiwan, and 34 in Hong Kong—trace a queer filmmaker’s path from first crush to hard-won self-acceptance. Tracy Choi adapts her own story into warm, unguarded cinema.

A lost white dog searches for home across 10 years and three human lives he changes in this moving three-director story of love and loyalty from GDH, the studio behind How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies.

In 1948 Jeju, a young mother searches the forests beneath Hallasan for her missing child as soldiers are ruthlessly crushing opposition to the country’s partition. Ha Myung-mi turns historical terror into a tense, elemental survival drama.

Released by Columbia Pictures into a U.S. preoccupied with Whitewater, FBI scandals, and anti-government extremism intensified by the Oklahoma City bombing, Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 Shakespeare adaptation gave soaring, intricate poetry to institutional mistrust.

A throng of tobacco farmers working on an estate live in a state of extreme deprivation, but nothing is what it seems in Alice Rohrwacher’s transfiguring and transfixing fable, which touches on perennial class struggle and enters the realm of parable.

A teenager buried in debt drifts into the shadow economy that destroyed his family, taking a criminal gig in the woods. Then comes the bear. Eisuke Naito’s gruesome, bleakly funny, yamibaito creature feature bites hard.

The latest documentary feature from Romanian New Wave master Corneliu Porumboiu is a hilarious and politically incisive portrait of a bureaucrat who dreams of radically revising the rules of the beautiful game, in a bid to revolutionize the world’s most popular sport.

A tofu-maker’s kid, a battered Toyota AE86, and mountain roads built for trouble. From the directors of Infernal Affairs, the drift-racing cult favorite returns in 20th-anniversary 4K.

Elaine May’s (in)famous and hilarious fourth directorial feature stars Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as broke, hack musicians who agree to take a gig as the lounge band for a hotel in Marrakesh and get swept up in a gaggle of plots and machinations along the way.

Two young Chinese expats and aspiring filmmakers drift apart when the pandemic strands her in Los Angeles and leaves him chasing his first feature in New York. Writer-director Yan Kunao, who also plays the lead, finds dry comedy in no-budget filmmaking and diaspora limbo.

A widow tries to close her life down, but when a piano and a Korean adoptee conductor turn up, they begin reopening it with unexpected results. Kim Hye-ok and Justin H. Min (The Umbrella Academy, After Yang) star in Kim Jin-yu’s elegant drama.

A missing occult-magazine editor’s collection of urban legends points toward one terrifying place. The director of Noroi turns a viral Japanese web novel into found-document dread at its most unnerving and entertaining.

A broke director reopens a haunted theater, revives the Taiwanese opera his father abandoned, and falls for its leading lady—who’s been dead for 18 years. Chen Ta-pu packs supernatural comedy and backstage romance into a ghost story with laughter and tears.

From Song Lang director Leon Le, this hushed, beautifully composed chamber drama set in 1985 Saigon centers on a romance between a young translator and a widowed cook from the defeated South.

Three estranged friends, once bound by a shared dream of acting, reunite by chance for one night in Taipei in Kuo Cheng-chui’s warm, melancholy drama about friendship and words left unspoken.

Giancarlo Giannini won the Best Actor prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival for his turn in Lina Wertmüller’s tragicomic tale, set in the early 1930s, of an anarchist who plans to assassinate Mussolini with help from a Roman sex worker.

Sara Minami, Kasumi Arimura, and Haru Kuroki play three desperate women who stumble into gold smuggling in Singapore and find out that crime, fast cash, and freedom travel well together.

Articulating state-sanctioned history itself as a conspiracy, Spike Lee smuggled into his big-budget studio biopic a radical analysis of an American life that remains vital, moving, provocative, and unsparing as ever.

A disorienting, harrowing account of fighting on the Alpine Front during World War I, between 1916 and 1917, Francesco Rosi’s anti-war war film remains a gritty and chaotic provocation.

Set entirely across one anxious night, Elaine May’s emotionally tremulous third feature stars John Cassavetes as a Philly gangster running for his life and Peter Falk as his childhood friend who—unbeknownst to him—is helping his pursuers.

The great Joan Chen stars in Xiaodan He’s landmark queer drama as a Chinese immigrant wife and mother in Montreal whose affair with a younger Québécoise woman turns one summer into a secret, sensual awakening.

Taxi driver Hùng needs money. The internet needs a hero. One staged rescue later, Hùng is trapped inside the lie that may save his daughter’s life. Vietnamese box-office king Thái Hòa stars in Võ Thạch Thảo’s debut.

Chung Ji-young’s intense, searching drama, which had its world premiere at this year’s Berlinale, links a teenager ashamed of his name and his mother (Yeom Hye-ran) to the buried trauma of the 1948 Jeju massacre.

Dayo Wong runs East Tsim Sha Tsui’s last great hostess club. Then Sammi Cheng storms in as his ex-wife and the new CEO, with 30 days to save the fading palace. Jack Ng’s hit makes its international premiere in a rougher, seedier Director’s Cut.

Jordan Peele has described NOPE as a film about “our addiction to spectacle” and the “insidious nature of attention,” and its conspiracies (like the best of them) are scattered as breadcrumbs throughout his wonderful third feature.

The ostensible conspiracy involves microfilm and Soviet agents in all but name, but Hitchcock’s decision to make his lead (Cary Grant) an advertising man gives this misrecognition road-movie-farce a far more stinging message about freedom from choice in the U.S.

A group of women attempt to infiltrate a men’s-only football stadium during a World Cup qualifying game in Palme d’Or–winning director Jafar Panahi’s sharply observed social comedy, which uses humor to expose the often absurd position of women in Iranian society.

Pulse-quickening archival footage and revelatory new interviews chart the larger-than-life ascent of the charismatic “King of Soccer,” who led Brazil—then in the throes of political turmoil that would culminate in a U.S.-backed military dictatorship—to three World Cup championships.

The film that announced Italian neorealism—and Roberto Rossellini and Anna Magnani as major forces in international cinema—this devastating look at life in Nazi-occupied Rome sent shockwaves through the world and retains its devastating, paradigm-shifting power.

In this delicate and poignantly autobiographical film from Carla Simón (Alcarràs, NYFF60), 18-year-old Marina negotiates her idealized memories of her parents, whom she lost at a young age, when she arrives in sun-kissed Galicia to meet her extended family for the first time.

The singular Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin (Enys Men, NYFF60) immerses the viewer in the uncanny environments of the small towns along the coast of Cornwall, here spinning a sci-fi-tinged tale of dislocation and regeneration starring George MacKay and Callum Turner.

Hong Kong screen legend Stephen Chow directs and co-stars in this high-octane, cult-favorite genre mashup, in which a down-and-out footballer joins forces with an idealistic kung fu master in hopes of leading their ragtag team of Shaolin monks to victory on the pitch.

Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum headline this millennial rom-com classic, a Clueless-style update of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night that follows a talented teen athlete who sets out to prove herself by joining an all-boys high school soccer team—while disguised as her twin brother.

This program of short films includes Benny Wang’s Apes, Cami Kwan’s Paper Daughter, Yating Hsu’s Girl Talk, Ning Qian’s Buddha the Betrayer, Daphne Zelle’s Where Belly Goes, Diana Bang and Andrea Bang’s One Last Walk, and Imanuel Bolaman’s Autosave.

This program of short films includes Altay Ulan Yang’s Hyena, Anatole Sloan’s Our Child, Shen Chieh Tsang’s No Place Like Home, Hao Zhou’s Correct Me If I’m Wrong, Zéré Turlykhanova’s Coffin Therapy, and Surya Balakrishnan’s The Housekeeper.

This program of short films includes Jen Nee Lim’s Buah (Fruit), Yijian Shan’s Si Shui (Still Water), Xinhui Ma’s Flamingo in the Garden, Arvin Belarmino and Kyla Romero’s Agapito, Linjie Sheng’s A Dream Like a Dream, Sari Arambulo’s Cookie, Love, and Soojeong Son’s Cecilia Is Only Eight Years Old.

Ildikó Enyedi (director of Oscar-nominated On Body and Soul) returns with a century-spanning triptych about lives that unfold around an ancient ginkgo tree. Featuring Tony Leung as a neuroscientist whose attempt to measure the tree’s signals tests the limits of perception, Venice Best Young Actress winner Luna Wedler, and Léa Seydoux.

The Sex Pistols hit, Tokyo calls, and a countryside photographer finds himself inside Japan’s punk explosion. Tomorowo Taguchi and writer Kankuro Kudo resurrect the Tokyo Rockers as scrappy DIY legends.

Peng Fei’s sweeping, idealistic epic, which premiered in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival, follows a stubborn Northeast Chinese worker chasing his late father’s dream of flying, from the reform era’s dance halls to one final ascent.

With its palindromic structure, Ludwig Göransson’s blaring score, a dense, hermetic plot, and nested conspiracies, Christopher Nolan’s “quantum Cold War thriller” is a time-travel blockbuster that arrived in a pandemic-era world already fractured by asynchronous experiences of time.

A demon returns to Thailand’s oldest and largest Catholic community, takes hold of a former priest, and forces Church exorcism and Isan folk ritual into one terrifying confrontation.

A young man becomes a bandit under fascism, but even after liberation, his thirst for justice leads the authorities to persecute him. This forgotten epic fresco of Southern Italy was censored to remove politically sensitive scenes and was not seen in its original version until 2012.

A murdered detective opens the way to a nine-year-old kidnapping case in Tetsuya Nakashima’s dark ensemble mystery of family wreckage and buried guilt.

A seminal depiction of life in the age of fascism, Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterpiece, one of the great political films of its time and an enduring psychological autopsy of the fascist mindset, follows a repressed man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who gets caught up in the hegemonic fascist regime.

A celebrated fashion designer finds it impossible to readjust to her former life after surviving a shocking plunge into an icy lake in Argentinean filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler’s existential puzzle, a work of compelling psychological interiority.

Searching for his long-lost chat room crush Zelda, a Hong Kong chef cooks his way through four dates, four Zeldas, and one deliciously awkward reckoning with love, memory, and appetite in Amos Why (Far Far Away, NYAFF 2022) and Frankie Chung’s funny, tender romance.

Ma Li stars in Andrew Lau’s true story of Zang Jianhe, who sold handmade dumplings near Wan Chai Pier and built them into the legendary Wanchai Ferry brand.

This classic, Oscar-winning drama, set amid the rise of fascism in the 1930s, chronicles the plight of the wealthy, intellectual Finzi-Contini family, whose estate serves as a gathering place for the local Jewish community amid growing anti-Semitism.

Among the most disarmingly funny and cathartic entries in Tsai Ming-liang’s filmography, The Hole sets one of cinema’s strangest and most tender end-of-the-world romances in a crumbling Taipei apartment block.

Devout Muslim teenager Fatima (Cannes Best Actress winner Nadia Melliti) takes a journey of self-discovery amid her Algerian immigrant family in Paris in Hafsia Herzi’s queer coming-of-age story. Nominated for six César Awards, winner of Best Female Newcomer (Melliti).

Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master suggests, in beguiling, elliptical fashion, how a closed belief system with “secret knowledge” fed on a real hunger for coherence and consolation in post-WWII America.

Before superhero cinema took over, Andrew Lau’s The Storm Riders gave Hong Kong its own comic-book apocalypse: peak pop idols Ekin Cheng and Aaron Kwok, prophecy, magic swords, heroic hair, and CGI in overdrive.

When lightning revives an old woman, a grieving young man sees a way to reach the afterlife in Thiti Srinuan’s funny, eerie, and unexpectedly moving box-office smash, a return to the beloved Thibaan Universe that’s open to first-timers.

Brian De Palma transformed a TV property into a subversive crime epic showing Capone (Robert De Niro) not merely as a villain but as the visible face of an over-greased criminal system cloaked behind tailored suits, marble lobbies, opera boxes, and police badges.

Ten years on, the Korean blockbuster that conquered the world returns in 4K. Yeon Sang-ho’s breakout transforms a zombie outbreak aboard a bullet train into one of the great modern action-horror rides.

A widow (Sophia Loren, in an Oscar-winning role) and her daughter find peace (and an affable Marxist played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) in the countryside during World War II, but their idyll is shattered on their way back to Rome.

At the end of World War II, the arrival of a deserter in a small mountain village disrupts the delicate balance of the community. Maura Delpero’s intimate film about a remote world offers a modern and thought-provoking take on the past and the relationships between men and women.

The life of Benito Mussolini receives one of its most probing, sophisticated treatments at the hands of Marco Bellocchio through his focus on the figure of Ida Dalser, Mussolini’s first wife, whom he abandons during his rise to power.

A Valentine’s Day bus explosion exposes a forbidden love story in Herman Yau’s furious Hong Kong crime tragedy, where social despair turns violently, devastatingly intimate.