Inspired by the life of Qiu’s grandfather and featuring his father, Qiu Zhimin, in a central role, A New Old Play follows a single theater troupe, the New-New Theatre and Opera School, beginning with its inception in 1920s Sichuan Province, then passing through the ructions of the Japanese occupation in World War II, the volte-face following the communist victory in the Civil War, and the ruinous effects of the Cultural Revolution. 'Daringly and imaginatively dramatizes 20th-century Chinese political history... [Told] with affecting intimacy and candid observation—and with archly ironic methods... Blatantly contrived sets and supernatural fantasy sequences... virtually shout at viewers not to take the depicted events as literal truth.' —The New Yorker

The capper of Park’s Revenge Trilogy follows a woman wrongfully imprisoned for kidnapping and killing a six-year-old boy, as she meticulously lays the groundwork for an elaborate plan of retribution, then sets it into merciless motion on her release. An ingeniously plotted thriller, slowly peeling back layers to reach its unnerving final revelation.

Making films together since 2004, Kalman and Horn have developed and refined a style that’s entirely their own, an idiosyncratic blend of ethereal synth-scored reverie, deadpan absurdist humor, sly sociopolitical observation, and genre-bending play. Their latest is an outrageous, visually sumptuous, more than slightly surreal homage to the ’90s late-night cable erotic thriller—structured as seven “episodes,” with individual credit sequences and titles like 'Asses to Ashes'—starring Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai as two INTERPOL agents tasked with investigating a mysterious death in Mexico who find themselves contending with fitness freak interns, sultry scientists, a psychic network of coral reefs, and their own smoldering desires. An oddball oneiric delight.

A sprawling and intimate evocation of the Taiwan of Yang’s teenage years: the outset of the 1960s, a period defined by street gang activity, the political repression of the Kuomintang military government, and the ubiquity of American pop culture. A Brighter Summer Day takes its inspiration from the story of the country’s first juvenile homicide, with Chang Chen’s brooding outsider just one figure in Yang’s bustling tapestry, regarded in seemingly serene long takes that bristle with repressed emotion.

An unlikely ancestor of Donnie Darko, Harvey is the only movie to pair a 6’3 1/2” white rabbit, the titular Harvey, and Jimmy Stewart. Stewart’s Elwood P. Dowd—the actor’s personal favorite of his many film performances—is a swell, likable, well-adjusted guy... he just happens to have a giant bunny that no one else can see for his best friend. An altogether endearing and often howlingly funny film based on the popular 1944 play of the same name by Mary Chase, in which Stewart had also starred, featuring Josephine Hull as Dowd’s exasperated sister, who wants nothing more than to see her brother in a padded cell.

Mesmeric and austerely awesome, Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner takes place on the eve of WWI in a Protestant village in northern Germany beset by a series of strange and mysterious incidents that gradually come to seem like auguries of approaching Doomsday. 'His best ever... Detailed yet oblique

Filmed in the lush, remote forests of the Eastern Himalayas at the India-Bhutan border, Dutta and Srinivasan’s exquisitely crafted documentary immerses the viewer in the hidden nocturnal life of a little-seen corner of the globe, observing—with a scrupulous attention to process that casts a serene spell over the viewer—a scientist and her Indigenous assistant in their nightly study of native hawk moths and their patterns. Fixing its focus on the minute details of these small creatures and their brief lives, Nocturnes poses some very big questions concerning our impact on the environment and the unexpected affinities between insects and humans, all the while offering a ravishing, symphonic celebration of the natural world.

Golden Harvest wuxia meets Looney Tunes lunacy meets Chaplinesque underdog fantasy in Chow’s anything-goes, over-the-top masterpiece, in which he stars as a would-be gangster caught between sparring rival factions in Pig Sty Alley, a corner of a stylized soundstage 1930s Shanghai watched over by Yuen Qui’s slatternly, superpowered landlady. With a little Hollywood money and a boundless imagination, Chow creates nothing short of a contemporary classic—you can’t knock the Hustle.

Its title evoking, fittingly, Charles Dickens’s tale of grinding life in a Victorian English textile mill town, the second episode of Wang’s trilogy takes us into the summer months in Zhili’s crowded, cluttered sweatshops, when tempers flare, bank accounts dwindle, and whispers among the laborers packed into the dormitories along Happiness Road concerning unfit working conditions, managerial malfeasance, and unionization rise to a desperate din. A film of massive scope but extraordinary precision, its keenly observed vignettes of interpersonal tension and against-all-odds comradeship building to a masterfully orchestrated climax.

Maggie Cheung in the role she was literally born to play: Maggie Cheung. The Hong Kong actress is imported to star in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1915 serial Les Vampires directed by a New Wave has-been (Jean-Pierre Léaud), but then finds herself submerged in a strange world of flirtatious lesbians, bourgeois ex-radicals, Luc Besson admirers, and all-night raves, all the while becoming oddly in thrall to her form-fitting S/M catsuit, which lures her out onto the rooftops of Paris. A meditation on global cinema at a moment of transition, a comedy about filmmaking and cultural crosstalk, and a movie so alive to the textures of contemporaneity that it hasn’t aged a day.

Tati’s alter-ego, the long-limbed, umbrella-clutching, accident-prone Monsieur Hulot, just doesn’t get along with the modern world—not with the Villa Arpel, his brother-in-law’s pretentious, uninvitingly geometric house that bristles with a host of hazardous conveniences, nor with the plastic hose factory where he takes a job—but he’s adored by his 9-year-old nephew, Gérard, for whom his uncle is the antidote to the sterility of life with his parents. A marvel of timing and comic choreography by Tati—the direct descendant of Chaplin—who exceeds the master in his hysterical use of sound effects.

The multi-hyphenate talent Ester Krumbachová co-wrote Vávra’s live at the witch trials drama, which exposes scenes of satanic panic in 17th-century Moravian, led by inquisitor Boblig von Edelstadt (Vladimir Šmeral), a real historical figure. Committed to rooting out practitioners of the black arts, he shows no scruples about stooping to torture in order to coerce confessions from helpless women—a depiction of hysteria of denunciation and persecution regarded by some contemporary viewers as being as much a commentary on Czechoslovakia at the beginning of the 1970s as Europe in the 1670s. Shot in stark, stunning black-and-white CinemaScope, Witchhammer is always scrupulous in authentic period detail, but its tale of political/sexual repression and concomitant misogyny, alas, a timeless one.

At the risk of courting controversy: Russell’s The Blob is the rare remake to improve upon its original, taking the basic premise of the 1958 drive-in classic—a meteorite crashes to earth, unleashing an acidic gelatinous creature that quickly gets to work devouring everything in its path—and adding an element of military-industrial complex conspiratorial paranoia, some of the juiciest and most insidiously creative kills in the annals of ’80s horror, and Kevin Dillon’s gloriously archetypal loner rebel in a pulse-pounding sewer motorcycle chase that includes a bitchin’ 'wall of death' evasion. Put quite simply, The Blob rocks.

Herzog brashly took up the mantle of German Expressionism when revisiting the unhallowed soil of Murnau’s silent masterpiece, with old foe and collaborator Klaus Kinski filling Max Schreck’s shoes (and talons) as the pestilent Transylvanian Count; Isabelle Adjani as the owner of the pale, slender neck that he so dearly desires to sink his fangs into; and Bruno Ganz as her beloved Jonathan, desperate to discover why his bride is wasting away. Working for the first time with international financing, Herzog was able to unleash horror on a truly epic scale, with Mexican mummies, oceans of rats, and other abominations making up individual movements in his symphony of terror.

An early and less often screened knockout from the fertile mind of Miyazaki, making his first film under the Studio Ghibli banner, this amazing, ornately animated adventure set in a fantastic version of the 19th century gets underway when an orphan girl, Sheeta, quite literally falls from the sky and into the arms of an unsuspecting boy named Pazu. Together, they set off to find Laputa, a fabled floating island that was once the home to an extinct civilization, and which hides a treasure of untold value—though they’ll first have to outwit sky pirates and army thugs in order to get there.

The film that would eventually lead to Němec’s political exile from Czechoslovakia and a 20-year break in his directing of theatrical features, Party and the Guests—co-written by Ester Krumbachová, then Němec’s wife—is a surreal satire in which a group of picnickers are beset by a gang of thuggish strangers who proceed to harass them with cruel and arbitrary tactics that would not seem unfamiliar to your average secret police organization. A bracingly bleak vision whose observations on authoritarianism—and the all-too-common human impulse to give in to it—remain vital long after the fall of the regime it was produced under.

The lone directorial effort of Krumbachová, better known as a scriptwriter (Daisies, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders) and costume designer, is a barbed, blissfully bizarre feminist satire released amidst the flowering of political and artistic liberation that was the 'Prague Spring,' concerned with a fortysomething woman and her relationship with a childhood friend—surname 'Devil'—who has aged into a crass glutton, his presence tolerated only because he represents her last hope for marriage. Co-written with enfant terrible Jan Němec, Murdering the Devil is a visually dynamic depiction of the grudge match battle of the sexes, and a pantheon work of the Czechoslovak New Wave.

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