Three sisters take up residence in a large family manor: Agnes, dying in agony of cancer; Karin, ripped apart by an appetite for human connection and an inability to get outside herself; and Maria, trapped in her own narcissism and sensuality.

One of the most beguiling, profound films ever made about the elusive art of acting, Desplechin’s first English-language work stars Summer Phoenix in a fascinating, almost feral performance as a rebellious child of London’s Jewish slums who becomes a celebrated stage actress in late-19th-century London.

Both a spirited depiction of Paris in the ’60s and a substantive take on the female psyche, Cléo from 5 to 7 is one of the cornerstones of the French New Wave, enduring for its intelligent perspective on the strong, unpredictable emotions that arise when facing one’s mortality.

Sumptuously photographed and exceedingly smart, Jane Campion’s interpretation of The Portrait of a Lady is a cinematic fever dream fascinated by the pictorial and sensuous forms of dominance within James’s text, and the inextricable bond between romantic love and violence.

Based on a novel by Jules and Jim author Henri-Pierre Roché, Two English Girls plays variations on François Truffaut’s earlier film’s ménage à trois: a young writer (Jean-Pierre Léaud) falls in love with two beautiful sisters (Kika Markham and Sylvia Marriott) at the start of the 20th century.

An aspiring movie star (Naomi Watts) finds herself in an obscure world of trouble upon meeting an enigmatic amnesiac brunette (Laura Harring) in this unique puzzle movie steeped in the romance and artifice of a bygone Hollywood. Widely considered the masterpiece of his late career and the ultimate expression of David Lynch’s deep love-hate relationship with Hollywood.

The Chinese wuxia (martial-arts) genre was never the same after King Hu’s breakthrough feature, which stars Cheng Pei-pei as Golden Swallow, a highly skilled swordswoman who goes on a mission to rescue her brother from a clan of bandits.

Crystalline in beauty and oblique in narrative, Cannes Best Director winner Hou Hsiao-hsien’s wuxia stars Shu Qi as a Tang Dynasty assassin, dedicated to the art of killing until memory transforms her course of action.

Luchino Visconti reached new heights of epic grandeur with his sweeping, Palme d’Or–winning account of political upheaval and generational sea change in Risorgimento-era Italy, starring Burt Lancaster as the patriarch of a ruling-class Bourbon family in the last gasps of its dominance.

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.

Experience the mysteries and revelations of Andrei Tarkovsky’s visually extraordinary and philosophically provocative 1979 science-fiction fable in this gorgeous digital restoration.

Claire Denis’s latest film—which features some of the most unsettling passages she has ever directed, as well as moments of the greatest delicacy and tenderness—is set aboard a spacecraft piloted by death row prisoners on a decades-long suicide mission to enter and harness the power of a black hole.

One year before his culture-shaking breakthrough Do The Right Thing, Spike Lee zeroed in on the racial and social divisions at an all-black college campus for this eminently listenable musical comedy.

In Boots Riley’s funny, scathing, weird, and audacious debut feature, Lakeith Stanfield plays a telemarketer at a company with a brave new world in mind for the country.

This audacious film from Bertrand Bonello (Saint Laurent) is both a precision-crafted thriller about a mass-scale terrorist attack on Paris and a provocative exploration of consumerism and millennial disaffection.

Korean master Lee Chang-dong’s expansion of Haruki Murakami’s short story “Barn Burning” is a love triangle (linked by rising star Steven Yeun) and a tense, haunting multiple-character study that bends the contours of the thriller genre to brilliant effect.

Paul Verhoeven’s first film in French ranks among his most incendiary, improbable concoctions: a wry, almost-screwball comedy of manners about a woman (a brilliant Isabelle Huppert) who responds to rape by refusing the mantle of victimhood.

Todd Haynes’s delirious rock opera about a journalist (Christian Bale) hired to reconstruct the sordid life story of the failed glam star (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) he’d idolized as a young man is as colorful, noisy, and chaotic as Haynes’s Safe had been clinically restrained.

In a powerhouse performance, Elisabeth Moss is Becky Something, the influential lead singer of a popular ’90s alt-rock outfit spiraling out of control as she struggles with her demons. The latest from Alex Ross Perry tracks Becky’s self-destruction—and potential creative redemption.

This rapturously beautiful 2005 feature by Hou Hsiao-hsien is a triumph about the melancholy play of time and memory. The action is broken into three different love stories set in different eras—a 1966 pool hall, a prosperous 1911 brothel, and contemporary Taipei—but starring the same leads, the impossibly glamorous Shu Qi and Chang Chen.

Barry Jenkins’s three-part narrative spans the childhood, adolescence, and adulthood of a gay African-American man who survives Miami’s drug-plagued inner city, finding love in unexpected places and the possibility of change within himself.