A mesmerizing and sensuous meditation on love and desire, Apichatpong’s first fiction feature follows a romance between a Thai nurse and her Burmese boyfriend as they set out on a jungle picnic.

Apichatpong’s wondrous sixth feature is a sun-dappled reverie set in and around a hospital ward full of comatose soldiers and conjures a haunted world where memory and myth intrude on physical space.

In the grandest yet most becalmed of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s works, Jessica (Tilda Swinton), an expat botanist visiting her hospitalized sister in Bogotá, becomes ever more disturbed by an abyssal sound that haunts her sleepless nights and bleary-eyed days. It’s a personal journey that’s also historical excavation, yielding a film of profound serenity.

In Apichatpong’s first feature—part road movie, part folkloric exercise, part surrealist party game—a camera crew travels through Thailand asking villagers to invent episodes in an ever-expanding story that ends up incorporating witches, tigers, surprise doublings, and impossible reversals.

A complex meditation on memory and a fictionalized account of the lives of Apichatpong’s parents before they became lovers, Syndromes and a Century is a film composed of two distinct halves: the first follows a female doctor at a small-town clinic, the latter a male doctor at a big city hospital.

Apichatpong’s intoxicating third feature, a haunting love story suffused with an air of myth and one of his signature films, concerns a young soldier’s jungle search for his vanished lover, who may have transformed into a tiger.

Apichatpong won the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival for this gently comic and wholly transporting tale of death and rebirth, in which a farmer suffering from kidney failure is tended by loved ones and visited by the ghosts of his wife and son.

This program includes The Anthem (2006), La Punta (2013), M Hotel (2011), Emerald (2007), Sakda (Rousseau) (2012), Mobile Men (2008), Cactus River (2012), Cinetracts (2020), Footprints (2014), and Worldy Desires (2005).

This program includes Trailer for CinDi (2011), Ashes (2012), Vampire (2008), and Haunted Houses (2001).

This program includes thirdworld(1997), Empire (2010), My Mother’s Garden (2007), Ghost of Asia (2005), Monsoon (2011), Luminous People (2007), Nimit (2007), Blue (2018), and A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009).

This program includes This and a Million More Lights (2003), Malee and the Boy (1999), Nokia Short (2003), Vapour (2015), Ablaze (2016), and Mekong Hotel (2012).

Among the most fascinating films by one of Japanese cinema’s all-time great iconoclasts, Oshima’s Boy—about a family of grifters who earn a living perpetrating a car-accident scam—is a dark comedy that advances some provocative conclusions about the effects of capitalism on the family unit.

Loosely inspired by the fifth volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Chantal Akerman’s hypnotic exploration of erotic obsession circles around the very-strange-indeed relationship between the seemingly pliant Ariane (Sylvie Testud) and the disturbingly jealous Simon (Stanislas Merhar).

A hallucinatory parable of pent-up passions run amok that unspools like a demented cautionary tale from a lost civilization, Guy Maddin’s visionary Careful follows the residents of the mythic mountain village of Tolzbad as they struggle to keep their desires and resentments in check.

In Russ Meyer’s enduringly influential, black-and-white cult classic, three go-go dancers tear across the California desert on a nihilistic crime spree, a rampage saturated in attitude, style, and an insatiable hunger for thrills, no matter how violent.

A characteristically playful and philosophical examination of modern methods of education, Homework finds Abbas Kiarostami at his most curious and compassionate as he interviews children about their scholastic lives.

In Jacques Tourneur’s second collaboration with producer Val Lewton (and perhaps his most poetic film), a Canadian nurse working on an island in the West Indies turns to voodoo with the hope of curing her patient.

An essential work of cinematic nonfiction that pushes the envelope of what is possible in documentary filmmaking, A Man Vanishes finds Shōhei Imamura and his crew following a vanished businessman’s fiancee as she searches high and low for her missing partner.

In one of her finest performances, Gena Rowlands plays an aging stage star in the midst of preparing for a new role whose sense of self begins to crumble after she witnesses the car-accident death of an obsessive fan in Cassavetes’s masterful psychodrama.

Frederick Wiseman brings his incomparable powers of observation to bear on the animal kingdom in his 10th feature, chronicling the daily activities and experimental research undertaken by scientists at Atlanta’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

The life of an 84-year-old puppeteer serves as a map of the first half of the 20th century in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s consummately atmospheric 1993 masterpiece, one of the greatest films of the 1990s and a timeless work of cine-biography.