In one of Tsai Ming-liang’s best and sparest works, Lee Kang-sheng plays a variation on himself, wandering through a lonely urban landscape and seeking treatment for a chronic illness; at the same time, a young Laotian immigrant working in Bangkok goes about his daily routine. The lives of these two solitary men eventually converge.

Never has Argentinian filmmaker Matías Piñeiro’s art been more graceful or structurally complex than in his latest, in which he again uses a Shakespeare text to anchor a loose yet intellectually rigorous examination of life’s loves, labors, and futile pursuits.

An epic piece of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, Mangrove tells the true story of Frank Crichlow, the Trinidad-born owner of a café in Notting Hill who was arrested for protesting the police’s intimidation and brutality. This is a vivid and gripping dramatization of these events and the resulting landmark 1970 court case of Crichlow and the other defendants, who came to be known as the Mangrove Nine.

In Steve McQueen’s vivid adaptation of a true story set in the early ’80s, John Boyega gives an impassioned yet nuanced performance as Leroy Logan, a member of the London Metropolitan police force who both witnessed and experienced first-hand the organization’s fundamental racism.

In 1981, Alex Wheatle lands in a halfway house in Brixton, where he quickly acclimates to the West Indian neighborhood’s customs and styles, forming something like a family with his new friends and acquaintances. But when the Brixton Riots break out, Alex finds himself incarcerated, leading to a political awakening that changes his life forever.

The culminating installment of the Small Axe anthology is a chilling portrait of the British education system in the 1970s, capturing the impossible circumstances facing West Indian students from their very first day of school.

A movie of tactile sensuality and levitating joy, Lovers Rock is part of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology of decades-spanning films that alight on various lives in London’s West Indian community. Here, McQueen, in an ecstatic yet no less formally bold mode, charts the growing attraction between Martha (newcomer Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) and a brooding stranger (Micheal Ward) over the course of one night at a house party.

In this essential and timely documentary about police violence in contemporary France, filmmaker and journalist David Dufresne examines the ways in which a government justifies brutal acts against its own citizens, enacting totalitarian methods to keep the populace under its control.

An endlessly generative work of politics, humor, and philosophy, Ephraim Asili’s feature-length debut takes place almost entirely within the walls of a West Philadelphia house where a community of young people have come together to form a collective of Black artists and activists.

Nicolás Zukerfeld’s third feature is a wry, surprising work of filmmaking-as-criticism that traces a mysterious and amusing arc across the vast oeuvre of pantheon auteur Raoul Walsh, before suddenly reinventing itself as an essayistic investigation into memory, cinema, and their shared mutability.

In this first film from The Living and the Dead Ensemble—a collaboration among artists and performers from Haiti, France, and the United Kingdom spearheaded by artist Louis Henderson and curator Olivier Marboeuf—a group of young actors translate, rehearse, and debate their Creole production of Édouard Glissant’s play Monsieur Toussaint, creating a space in which the ghosts of Haiti’s colonial past return to address its present.

In November 1970, two movie mavericks, one already a legend (Orson Welles) and the other on his way to mythic status (Dennis Hopper), met for an epochal conversation, sharing their candid thoughts and feelings about cinema, art, and life. This entertaining and revealing footage, never before seen in full, has been resurrected by producer Filip Jan Rymsza and editor Bob Murawski.

William Klein’s masterful portrait of Ali is arguably the most complex documentary about an athlete ever made and exhilarating evidence that the three-time undisputed heavyweight champion of the world was one of the key cultural and political figures of his time.

In her first lead role, 18-year-old Laura Dern gave one of her most stirring, layered performances in Joyce Chopra’s adaptation of a Joyce Carol Oates short story about a teenager whose sexual exploration during her summer days in the Northern California suburbs takes a dangerous turn when she meets a mysterious stranger.

Indian filmmaker Chaitanya Tamhane’s much-anticipated follow-up to Court is a finely crafted labor of love set in the world of Hindustani classical music, starring singer—and remarkable first-time actor—Aditya Modak as a man living in Mumbai who tries to follow in the footsteps of his father and become a maestro in the Khayal raag music tradition.

In his new film, John Gianvito (The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein) meditates on a particular moment in early 20th-century history: when Helen Keller began speaking out passionately on behalf of progressive causes. The film is a rousing reminder of Keller’s undaunted activism for labor rights, pacifism, and women’s suffrage.

Mid-century home movies in glorious color and onscreen subtitles taken from the diaries of one Vivian Barrett provide the narrative skeleton for a singular exploration of storytelling in Nuria Giménez’s first feature, an imaginative cinematic sleight of hand.

A criminally overlooked work from the post-post-New Wave era of French cinema, Marie-Claude Treilhou’s stylish and atmospheric feature debut follows a porno theater usher through a series of curious encounters with acquaintances and eccentric strangers alike.

Economical yet expansive, and largely wordless, The Plastic House takes place inside and around a dilapidated greenhouse that belongs to filmmaker Allison Chhorn’s Cambodian family; in this quiet environment, she oversees inspiring regrowth despite the sometimes harsh natural elements.

Paying homage to the tradition of the griot in West African culture, this original vision from breakout Ivory Coast filmmaker Philippe Lacôte tells the story of a pickpocket (Koné Bakary), newly arrived at a correctional facility in the Ivorian capital of Abidjan, who, in order to stay alive, must keep his fellow inmates entertained with wild tales over the course of a night.

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first film set outside Taiwan is an achingly, intoxicatingly sensuous landmark and a pivotal transnational chapter in Tony Leung’s career that placed his famously modern melancholia inside an exquisite late-Qing tableau.

Five seasons, four parts, eight hours: the dimensions of C.W. Winter and Anders Edström’s film are as incommensurable as its central figure. Tayoko Shiojiri, a vegetable farmer who works and cares for her ailing husband in a small village north of Kyoto, Japan, is the nominal core of this monumental work, observed through precise tableaux and dense sonic collage that bend distinctions between fiction and documentary.

In Heinz Emigholz’s ambitious and surprisingly funny film, five cities around the world become the backdrops for a series of spiraling tête-a-têtes on such issues such as war crimes, racism, family, religion, sex, and cosmology. As one character says, it’s a film of “social taboos, the paradoxical logic of dreams, an infinite round dance.”

A director speaks at length to a psychoanalyst, confiding his obsessions, fears, ideas about cinema, and psychological blocks. Emigholz’s magnum opus is a playful, moving treatise on trauma and architecture in which foreground and background carry equal weight.

An Old White Male (John Erdman) holds court in the lobbies of various apartment buildings in Buenos Aires and expounds with measured disgust on death, consciousness, and the state of contemporary human relations. Heinz Emigholz’s spare continuation—and sardonic distillation—of certain themes explored in The Last City is morbid, confrontational, and hilarious.

Shot on Hi-8 videotape entirely within a smoky snack bar, with occasional interruptions by archival news bulletins and TV commercials, Luis López Carrasco’s second feature excavates the forgotten histories of 1992—a pivotal year in which Spain celebrated both the Olympic Games in Barcelona and the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, and ushered in a new age of neoliberalism.

“El Futuro tries to critically look at the values and customs that Spanish society acquired stunningly fast at the beginning of the ’80s. These were values, behaviors, and new ways of living that I have also shared and lived.” —Luis Lopez Carrasco

Nicolás Pereda’s ticklish and dark-toned feature mixes realism and absurdity in the story of a television actress who joins her estranged brother and new boyfriend to visit her parents’ rustic home in the Mexican countryside, where they encounter culture clash and familial tensions. But Pereda has a metafictional trick up his sleeve.

This latest dispatch from beyond the grave by the legendary Chilean director Raúl Ruiz (completed, as ever, by his widow, the filmmaker Valeria Sarmiento) tells the surrealistic tale of a sickly literature professor haunted the memory of his wife and attempting to carry on as normal despite the ever-weakening boundary between his dreams and waking life.

In her striking feature debut, Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili tells the devastating story of a persecuted family of Jehovah’s Witness missionaries in a remote village from the perspective of a traumatized wife and mother.

Among the most essential filmmakers of the past several decades, Jia Zhangke launched his career with this, his 1997 debut about a pickpocket struggling to keep up with the current of China’s transformation into an economic powerhouse.

The sacred Atarrabi and the profane Mikelats follow wildly divergent paths in Eugène Green’s tale of two brothers, a modern-dress take on Basque myth perched on the line between earnest spirituality and sly satire.

A turn-of-the-20th-century Christmas Eve gathering among five members of the European elite at an elegant Transylvanian estate becomes the setting for an increasingly intense succession of conversations in Cristi Puiu’s pristine, sometimes terrifying vision of the simmering violence beneath the colonialist’s veneer of politesse.

The thriller genre is exploded and reassembled in DeNardo and Felten’s funny and alluring work on paranoia, surveillance, and performance, featuring an intriguingly eclectic cast: experimental theater performers Stephanie Hayes and Scott Shepherd, the musician Eleanor Friedberger, and Chloë Sevigny, among others.

Berlin-based filmmakers Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy fashion a poetic and deadpan 16mm work of fanciful nonfiction based on historical attempts to bring back the aurochs, a breed of wild cattle extinct since the early 17th century.

The collective trauma of the Holocaust looms over this adaptation of Jewish author Bruno Schulz’s visionary and poetic reflection on the nature of time and death, which won the Jury Award at Cannes.