Ruiz’s most ambitious literary adaptation—an attempt to condense all of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time into a single feature, using the novel’s last installment as a kind of frame—is also one of his most transporting reflections on the movies’ power to seize and preserve moments of time. An NYFF37 selection.

In one of Ruiz’s signature works of the 1980s, a Parisian film projectionist receives a surprise visit from his Apollinaire-reciting uncle and falls in love with a dancer who appears in a movie he projects, triggering a delirious succession of stories within stories that lures us ever deeper into a Ruizian labyrinth of fantasy and desire.

Ruiz mastered the absurdist black comedy with this whiplash-inducing parody of the ensemble whodunit in which a Swiss aristocrat hires a psychopath to kill his equally maniacal daughter in order to free up her inheritance from his previous marriage.

A 9-year-old boy insists that a mentally unstable violin teacher is his real mother in this consummately Ruizian tale of madness and mistaken identity, loosely adapted from a Massimo Bontempelli novella and starring Isabelle Huppert and Jeanne Balibar.

After blacking out, a tour guide returns to his apartment and finds a mysterious intruder who holds him accountable for his lover’s death. Toggling modes of farce and tragedy (and punctuated by Iberian sea shanties), Ruiz’s rarely screened adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband is one of his most elliptical and intriguing works.

Sharing an inability to sleep, a voyeur and a hunchbacked boxer decide to rape a pregnant woman, who then throws herself into the Seine, only to return in new, horrifying forms. This barbed avant-garde tale of trauma and delirium is one of Ruiz’s most confrontational visions. Screening with Dog’s Dialogue.

Described by Ruiz as “a fresco of real and imaginary characters revolving around a single point of focus,” Klimt is less a biopic of notorious 19th-century painter than a deep dive into lascivious fin de siècle Vienna.

Using Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s 17th-century Spanish play La vida es sueño as a jumping-off point, Ruiz tackles the 1971 coup in his homeland of Chile as well as interrogates the dubious feedback loop between experience and thought.

Cryptic, transfixing, and suffused with the director’s signature play with space and time, Ruiz’s film of Jean-Claude Gallotta’s nine-person experimental ballet about “full-fledged doubt” is one of his most abstract yet accessible works.

In Ruiz’s playfully elegiac final masterwork, loosely adapted from the fantastical short stories of Chilean writer Hernán del Solar, an elderly office worker begins reliving memories from his past, both real and imagined, including a childhood trip to the movies with Beethoven and listening to tall tales from Long John Silver. An NYFF50 selection.

Shot in Holland in roughly a week without a script, Ruiz’s delirious, visually stunning satire of imperialism and the social sciences focuses on an anthropologist who ventures with his family into the Patagonian wilds to study a strange, dying language.

Ostensibly an erotic thriller starring Anne Parillaud and William Baldwin, Ruiz’s final foray into pulp is a Hitchcockian shadow play of doubles that turns a paperback-worthy premise into a Rorschach-blot interrogation of the self and the unconscious.

Filmed on the Portuguese island of Madeira, where Ruiz was simultaneously making City of Pirates, the noir homage Vanishing Point is a rib-tickling breadcrumb trail of repetitions and allusions about an unnamed man in a seaside town who witnesses a murder… or was it just a dream?

Shot in 1990 but unfinished until nearly six years after Ruiz’s death, The Wandering Soap Opera is a wildly inventive, episodic satire born of Ruiz and his wife and collaborator Sarmiento’s attempt to view Chilean political life through the sublime and ridiculous prism of the telenovela.