In the gag-a-minute, gleefully maximalist second feature from Daniels, Michelle Yeoh delivers a career-defining performance as a first-generation Chinese-American who is plunged into a multiversal war of “’verse jumpers” that places the fate of every universe in her hands.

Daniels announced themselves with this unequivocally weird, frequently hilarious debut feature, which won the U.S. Dramatic Directing Award at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and remains one of the most original films of that year, due in no small part to the impeccably balanced performances from Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe.

Between Swiss Army Man and Everything Everywhere All at Once, native Alabamian Scheinert stepped aside to direct this darkly funny thriller set in the Deep South.

Wong Kar Wai’s most ambitious film to date features exquisitely staged action and a virtuosic performance by Tony Leung as the legendary kung fu master Ip Man.

This unclassifiable, expansive movie from Leos Carax operates on the exhilarating logic of dreams and emotions.

Consider this program—a jam-packed block of short narratives, documentaries, internet and music videos, animation tests, and more—a rare glimpse into the tempo and form of Daniels’ restlessly inventive combined consciousness.

Hayao Miyazaki’s breathtaking epic spirits viewers away to a folkloric world of gods, demons, and magic in which humans and animals—led by Princess Mononoke, aka San, a fierce warrior woman raised by wolves—battle for control of a mythological forest.

Based on the Robin Nishi manga, Masaaki Yuasa’s postmodern cult animation Mind Game, his debut feature, is a genre-melding ego-cum-acid-trip to the beyond (and back) that channels everything from Buddhism and the Bible to Hayao Miyazaki, Tex Avery, and Salvador Dalí.

A badly injured former champion rodeo rider and horse trainer is forced to give up the life he knows and loves in this documentary-inflected fiction film set on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, a work of exceptional compassion and truth.

Following an eight-year hiatus, Harmony Korine returned to filmmaking with this disarmingly sweet, fascinatingly oblique meditation on the obsessive nature of faith and celebrity worship. Diego Luna stars as a Michael Jackson impersonator based in Paris who develops a crush on a woman living as Marilyn Monroe.

This vulgar, unapologetically crude, and occasionally wholesome hidden-camera comedy turns a feature-length focus on the perverted 86-year-old Irving Zisman (Johnny Knoxville in heavy makeup), a recurring Jackass character since 2001, who is tasked with driving his 8-year-old grandson Billy (Jackson Nicoll) cross-country to his deadbeat dad.

Jennie Livingston’s iconic documentary offers an at once dazzling, dynamic, and intimate portrait of the Harlem drag balls of the 1980s, celebrating how African-American, Latino, gay, and transgender New Yorkers created a world of survival and joy.

A cowboy-hatted truck driver (Tsutomu Yamazaki) and his sidekick (a young Ken Watanabe) stop at a small noodle shop and help its meager business in Juzo Itami’s “ramen western”—a hilarious take on food and love that also functions as a tribute to spaghetti westerns and chambara films.

Rigorously staged vignettes in such striking settings as a furniture store, an airport, and a seemingly endless traffic jam build off of one another in Roy Andersson’s singular feature from 2000, which reckons with the melancholic norms and anomalies of the modern world.

Filmed at the peak of Jackie Chan’s prime, 16 years after his breakout turn in Drunken Master, this transcendent pairing of classic Shaw Brothers director Lau Kar-leung and Chan resulted in what many claim is the greatest martial arts film ever made.

A nameless yuppie insomniac (Edward Norton) and a glamorous soap salesman (Brad Pitt) process late 1990s angst through bare-knuckled therapy in David Fincher’s ultra-sleek coming-of-age film for thirty-somethings.

Writer-director-actor Stephen Chow’s hilariously bonkers homage to/send-up of kung fu and American cinema displays an audacious blending of genres and tones that turned the 2004 feature into an instant modern classic.

A revolutionary reimagination of cinematic visualization that paved the way for three sequels, a spin-off anime, video games, and endless parodies and think pieces, The Matrix isn’t just one of the most influential movies of all time—it changed how the mainstream responded to reality itself.