Bresson patiently follows the tragic lives and investigates the souls of a donkey and its occasional owner (Anne Wiazemsky in her debut role) in rural France.

With its cast of former reform school inmates, Susumu Hani’s harsh and riveting portrait of juvenile detention was a formative film in the emergence of the Japanese New Wave.

Denis Côté’s mesmerizing study of the ostriches, lions, horses, zebras, camels, and giraffes at a Quebec safari park proceeds without commentary, framing devices, or anything else that might distract from the animals’ challenging gazes

Mbissine Thérèse Diop is by turns magnetic and devastating in Ousmane Sembene’s debut feature. A formative and eye-opening work, and one of the director’s finest.

Shot in Texas with a largely non-professional cast on an exceedingly lean $5,000 budget, The Blood of Jesus concerns a woman who, near death after being accidentally shot by her husband, discovers herself at a crossroads between a heavenly afterlife and damnation.

Propelled by a driving post-punk soundtrack and featuring a nonprofessional cast Borden hoped would reflect the movie’s prospective audience, this feminist sci-fi cult classic set on the tenth anniversary of a socialist revolution in America remains a thrilling and timely allegory of rebellion.

This deeply personal epic, set in the early 1960s and inspired by the true story of Taiwan’s first juvenile homicide case, follows rebellious teenager Xiao Si’r (Chen Chang) as he comes of age amidst rival street gangs and the “White Terror” witch hunts of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government.

A masterful exploration of the nature of truth and cinematic illusion, with a distinctly offbeat sense of humor, Close-up has been widely hailed as one of Kiarostami’s crowning achievements and one of the greatest films of the 1990s.

The shadowy, profoundly sad ghost story that concluded Costa’s Fontainhas trilogy was another great leap forward from the director—the movie that relocated his work to the abstract, jagged mental spaces in which his recent films take place.

Based on the novel by Warren Miller about a teenager navigating the violent turf wars and internal hierarchies of Harlem gangs, The Cool World possesses something of a documentary quality as a result of its uptown location shooting, cast of local non-actors, and partially improvised performances.

An impressionistic study about the loaded life in Los Angeles starring actual heroin addicts, Dusty and Sweets McGee captures the languorous rhythms of scoring and shooting up through an artful blend of scripted and verité episodes.

Neglected for decades prior to its rerelease in 2008, Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles recounts a day in the life of a group of Native American twenty-somethings who have migrated from Arizona to Los Angeles.

Benning’s dreamily lo-fi featurette centers upon a melancholy tween tomboy grappling with their gender identity in working class Milwaukee. Thornton’s Peggy and Fred in Hell is an idiosyncratic chronicle of two children charting a course through a post-apocalyptic landscape littered with the detritus of the 20th century.

Nonprofessional actor Dore Mann plunges himself into the role of a self-described “troll” who lives with an arrogant roommate in a wretched Brooklyn apartment and sells disability benefit coupons door-to-door in Ronald Bronstein’s film, shot with a tiny crew and a ragtag style on 16mm.

Rossellini’s merciless view of a child caught between the needs of his ailing family and the designs of an ex-Nazi amid the ruins of postwar Berlin was perhaps the great director’s most radical, uncompromising, and personal film.

Pasolini’s version of the Gospel, lauded by both art-house audiences and religious groups, was shot in natural settings in southern Italy, forsaking mythic grandeur in favor of a depiction that emphasizes the political radicalism of Christ’s life, with a visual style that drew from contemporaneous documentary and Renaissance painting alike.

Three young men emigrate from Niger to big city to seek their fortunes in Jean Rouch’s delightful “ethno-fiction,” composed largely of incidents from the lives of its actors.

Albert Serra’s magisterial inside-out retelling of Don Quixote—a string of meandering vignettes starring a former tennis instructor—marked the arrival of one of contemporary cinema’s great original minds.

Valeska Grisebach drew this luminous, plainspoken account of small-town infidelity from interviews with locals from Berlin-Brandenburg—and in the process crafted one of contemporary cinema’s great domestic tragedies.

Commissioned by Standard Oil, Flaherty’s final film, a kind of bucolic idyll set to a buoyant Virgil Thomson score, follows a young Cajun boy and his pet raccoon as they float along the bayou, threatened by the creeping menace of alligators that glide silently across the water’s surface.

Long takes of inordinate beauty coalesce with images of natural horror as an ex-con traverses the Argentine jungle in Lisandro Alonso’s immersive odyssey.

Maurice Pialat was already in his early forties when he made his epochal debut about a troubled, aggressive foster child bounced from home to home—one of the most explosive first films in the history of French cinema.

Eisenstein’s grandly orchestrated film about the Russian Revolution, commissioned for its tenth anniversary, was one of his most ambitious attempts to find a form for his theories of montage. If there is a star of October, it is the mass, the collective protagonist.

Straub-Huillet’s first color film adapts a lesser-known Corneille tragedy from 1664. The toga-clad, non-professional cast perform the drama’s original French text amidst the ruins of Rome’s Palatine Hill while the noise of contemporary urban life hums in the background.

To make this unclassifiable road movie, Miguel Gomes wove enough material for five films—including a love story, musical performances, and interviews with local working people—into a relaxed, sprawling panorama of rural Portugal.

Over the course of 23 carefully choreographed shots, we watch young filmmaker Liu Jiayin, her parents, and their cat act out a thinly fictionalized version of the life they share in a cramped Beijing apartment, where her father makes leather handbags.

Set almost entirely in the remote Bengal village where young Apu begins his journey, Satyajit Ray’s debut masterpiece changed the cinematic landscape of India and unveiled his enduring artistic voice to the world.

Il Posto follows wide-eyed Domenico as he journeys to Milan to interview for his first job. There, he becomes smitten with a young woman, Antonietta, applying for a position at the same company.

Shot in a documentary style, with non-actors cast partly according to their political sympathies, Watkins’s dystopian fantasy imagines a near-future where due process in America has been suspended as a response to increasing civil unrest, and the fates of political dissidents are instead determined by tribunal.

In Porterfield’s keenly observed portrait of young people in a Baltimore suburb coming together in the wake of a friend’s death, the actors play versions of themselves. Lertxundi prefers to work with non-actors as well, though the narrative of Cry When It Happens only flirts with legibility, presenting not a story but rather an enigmatic and emotionally resonant experiment with the conventions of film’s visual syntax and our attendant expectations.

In sharp contrast to his masterful earlier studio productions, Tabu was shot in Tahiti with a primarily local cast. The narrative concerns the ill-fated romance of a young couple who flee their homeland when their love is forbidden.

A postcolonial fantasy told with prodigious wit and a boldly digressive style, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki follows a pair of outsiders, strangers in their own country, who dream of leaving Senegal for a new life in France. One of the movie’s leads, Magaye Niang, is the subject of A Thousand Suns, a film portrait by Mambéty’s niece, Mati Diop.

Throughout the 1930s, Margaret Cram directed the same film again and again by traveling to cities across New England and producing her Movie Queen scenarios with the people who lived there. This program of three such reels gives a rare glimpse into a little-known genre of amateur filmmaking, which achieves a curious poignancy through the repetition of its design.

In 1964, Eduardo Coutinho was at work on a film about João Pedro Teixeira, who was murdered by the police as a result of his efforts to organize farm workers in northeast Brazil. Shooting was promptly halted as a result of the military coup that same year, but two decades later the director resumed production, resulting in a prismatically reflexive, genre-defying essay on political commitment and life under dictatorship.

Carlo Battisti, a professor of linguistics from Florence, gave one of the most iconic and moving performances in world cinema in Umberto D—one of Italian neorealism’s great swan songs. For Story of Caterina, their segment of the omnibus Love in the City, Francesco Maselli and Cesare Zavattini asked a young mother to reenact a harrowing episode from her recent past.

The heroine of one of Varda’s most celebrated features, played in a career-high performance by Sandrine Bonnaire, is a strong-willed young woman for whom freedom is its own costly end.

In I, An Actress, Kuchar is seen in one of his most memorable solo outings, directing a student screen test before grabbing the reins and performing the scene himself, taking the viewer to divine heights of overacting. In Vinyl, Warhol, as elsewhere in his filmography, showcases a kind of acting degree zero, a Ronald Tavel-adapted version of A Clockwork Orange.