Loosely adapting Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, Petzold’s graduation film follows two traveling cosmetic saleswomen—one nearing middle age and fighting for her job, the other a younger colleague who is also the boss’s lover—who start out as enemies and become outlaw accomplices. Screening with Süden.

This variation on the 1945 film noir classic Detour follows a homeless drifter’s search for his ex-lover-turned-prostitute on a desperate odyssey along the sunlit autobahns of 1990s Europe.

Petzold closes his unofficial trilogy about women on the run with this tale of a failed academic desperately seeking work and her femme-fatale sister, who dupes rich men around the luxury tourist resorts of Morocco.

Christian Petzold’s breakout film finds a pair of former far-left militants—on the run since the 1970s—posing as a bourgeois European couple on vacation with their rebellious teenage daughter, who’s hungering for a normal life.

The first of Christian Petzold’s many collaborations with actress Nina Hoss reshapes Hitchcock’s classic Vertigo around an attraction between a reserved attorney and a mysterious woman who’s new in town.

A self-absorbed luxury car salesman flees the scene of an accident that injures a young boy. But when he meets the boy’s supermarket-worker mother (Nina Hoss), he becomes embroiled in a melodrama of lies, romantic obsession, and simmering class conflict.

The spectral figures of Christian Petzold’s Ghosts are young nomads on the margins of Europe’s economy, two women drifting between foster homes and menial jobs who forge an ambiguous but tender alliance.

Based on the horror classic Carnival of Souls, Yella finds chills in the cold cruelty of a male-driven business culture, where a woman (Nina Hoss) discovers that her new job isn’t as promising as it seems.

In this unofficial adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, a hard-up Afghanistan war veteran takes a job with a wealthy Turkish entrepreneur. When he meets his boss’s quietly frustrated wife, the two begin a dangerous affair.

Petzold’s genre-bending, wonderfully unpredictable Beats Being Dead—one third of the television miniseries Dreileben—begins with a convicted criminal who escapes from a country hospital, but soon comes to center on the story of two star-crossed lovers.

Set in 1980, the first chapter of Christian Petzold’s “Love in Times of Oppressive Systems” trilogy centers around a doctor (Nina Hoss) exiled to a small town from East Berlin as punishment for applying for an exit visa.

Set in the period immediately following World War II, Phoenix is an engrossing reflection on the postwar reconstruction of identity couched as a noirish thriller of mistaken identity. Screening with the Hitchcock rumination Where Are You, Christian Petzold?

Franz Rogowski stars in Christian Petzold’s haunting film as a European refugee who has escaped from two concentration camps and assumes the identity of a dead novelist whose papers he is carrying.

The following two films were influences on Petzold’s work. A direct inspiration for the humiliating job interviews seen in The Sex Thief, Harun Farocki’s The Interview is a darkly funny documentary on job application training courses for dropouts, recovered addicts, mid-level managers, and the long-term unemployed. In Nothing Ventured, which inspired the corporate world of Yella, Farocki trains his incisive gaze on the world of venture capital, capturing entrepreneurs and consultants as they engage in ritualistic performances of presentation and negotiation.

John Berry’s subtle, claustrophobic noir follows a petty thief (Garfield) who takes a young, smitten girl (Shelley Winters) and her family hostage after a heist goes wrong. Screening with Jean Renoir’s small, impressionistic masterpiece A Day in the Country.

Xavier Beauvois’s tough, eruptive police procedural follows a young police academy graduate who joins an investigation within Paris’s busiest precinct and forms a complicated mentorship with a newly sober superior officer, Caroline Vaudieu (Nathalie Baye).

In Vincente Minnelli’s chronicle of small-town hypocrisy, Frank Sinatra gives one of his most textured portrayals as an embittered ex-GI who returns to his Midwestern hometown to write the next chapter of his life.

In François Truffaut’s penultimate film, Gérard Depardieu plays a happily married father who becomes fatefully entangled with a former lover when she and her family become the new tenants of a neighboring house.