Lulu Wang casts her penetrating gaze on the intersection of race and class in Hong Kong’s milieu of expats, and the migrant domestic workers employed by them, in this vivid adaptation of Janice Y. K. Lee’s widely acclaimed novel, The Expatriates (1998).

Awkwafina turns in a staggering lead performance as the Chinese-born, U.S.-raised Billi, who reluctantly goes from New York to Changchun to find that, although her entire family knows their beloved matriarch Nai Nai has been given a few weeks to live, everyone has decided not to tell her.

In Joanna Bowers’s debut documentary, the reality of the migrant domestic worker industry is plumbed with heartfelt intuition, shedding light on the thousands of women who, each year, travel from around Southeast Asia to seek employment as live-in caretakers for Hong Kong’s wealthiest families.

Arguably one of the greatest horror films of the 20th century, Nicolas Roeg’s contemporary Gothic features a married couple who relocate to a wintry, off-season Venice—where a serial killer menaces its emptied-out canals and alleys—some time after their young daughter drowns in an accident at their English country home.

Joe Piscatella’s Sundance Audience Award–winning documentary chronicles Hong Kong activist-politician Joshua Wong—just 14 years old and taking to task the Chinese government’s pro-Communist education program in Hong Kong.

Bong Joon Ho returns to small-town intrigue with this searing melodrama that also functions as a female-fronted whodunit featuring a career-best performance by veteran actress Kim Hye-ja. An NYFF47 selection.

Director Jin Moyoung’s documentary portrait of the 76-year companionship of “100-year-old lovebirds” became an unexpected blockbuster in South Korea and remains one of the country’s most successful films.

Robert Altman’s monumental, kaleidoscopic musical pushed the limits of collective filmmaking to render not just a portrait of a city but a radically prophetic panorama of 1970s America’s grandiose contradictions, incidental resonances, and culture-shifting tragedies.

Ruben Östlund’s unabashedly impolite feature is a controversial record, inspired by actual court cases, of five Black teenagers harassing white and Asian youths through scams and role-playing. An NYFF49 selection.

Ray Yeung’s gut-wrenching tale of forbidden love between two married men in their golden years shines a light on the isolation and heartache faced by those who dare to love outside the lines, delivering a powerful and unforgettable portrait of a love that refuses to be denied.

With a deft deployment of tropes that call to mind the great lineage of “bad seed” horror, Lynne Ramsay marked the end of a near-decade-long hiatus with this adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel, which follows the before-and-after life of a mother whose teenage son carries out a school massacre.

What begins as a richly textured portrait of loss gradually descends, with dreamlike pacing, into something more offbeat and shocking in Hlynur Pálmason’s follow-up to his award-winning debut Winter Brothers (ND/NF 2018).