Lightly inspired by David Bowie and other musicians, Todd Haynes’ glam-rock Citizen Kane is a stylishly audacious elegy to a bygone era. Amid all the debauchery and electric performances, the film casts a vibrant look at how queer icons impact fans who are in the process of finding themselves.

Celestial blues are speckled with red and religious icons flicker and fall in Alice Rohrwacher’s first feature. With cinematography by Hélène Louvart, the filmmaker braids the discoveries of girlhood into towering questions of faith to create a coming-of-age tale that is at once lived-in and divine.

Resistance sparkles across Agustina Comedi’s award-winning short about an underground queer scene in 1980s Argentina. Spectral playback of old videos sees riotous divas of that time adorned in rainbow-colored static, while melancholic, tender voiceover testifies to the unfading force of friendship.

An out-of-this-world nightmare birthed from metal and flesh, Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s cult horror classic frenetically rejects the drudgery of so-called normal life. Surrendering to the tactile allure of the machine, the human body undergoes extreme transformations, set to a frenzied industrial score.

Sound the bells, because American independent cinema has a distinctive new voice in director Jonathan Davies. Imagine a kindred film to Memoria that unfolds in verdant California, with a playfulness reminiscent of Jacques Rivette: this cabinet of sonorous, mysterious curiosities is just that.

Michael Haneke won his second Palme d’Or—and his first Oscar®—for this uncompromising yet compassionate drama depicting the difficult reality of death. A profoundly moving, unforgettable film, starring two all-time greats of French cinema: Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva.

The uncompromising auteur Michael Haneke was at his peak with this modern masterpiece, starring Juliette Binoche. Exploring personal and societal guilt, Hidden is a tense, unsettling, and impeccably crafted mystery that builds and builds and builds—yet still manages to catch you unprepared!

One of the greatest films of the 90s, Todd Haynes and Julianne Moore’s portrait of a suburban housewife beset by ambient fear is a masterpiece of slow-burn atmosphere and cultural critique. A breakthrough for the director and star, they create an enthrallingly open-ended film of haunting resonance.

West Berlin’s most ambitious housing project was built on humanist ideals, and yet some residents remained stuck in cycles of hardship and cruelty. In conversation with one fractured family unit, documentarian Helga Reidemeister points out failures of the present in the hope of a fairer tomorrow.

This exquisite restoration of Hungarian maestro Béla Tarr’s magnum opus has been a long time coming. Shot in languorous, extended takes and riven with mordant humour, Sátántangó is a pungent, Beckettian epic of the human condition. Don’t let the running time put you off, this is essential cinema.

One of Susan Sontag’s favorites, Alain Resnais’ acclaimed Mélo shines through its interplay between the theatrical and cinematic. Adapting Henri Bernstein’s play closely, Resnais’ rendition varies with immaculate long takes and compositions, highlighting outstanding performances from his actors.

Best described as the love child of Columbo and The Naked Gun, Graham Mason’s absurdist comedy gleefully spoofs 1970s mystery-of-the-week TV with plenty of love, silliness, and shocking accuracy. Brace yourself for inventive sight gags, increasingly ridiculous suspects, and a sea of bell-bottoms!

Composed of 16mm footage shot at the French Open in 1984, Julien Faraut’s documentary is an evocative portrait of tennis’s foremost showman. Narrated by Mathieu Amalric, the film penetrates McEnroe’s brilliance through archival footage by considering both his physicality and psychology.

After four films in Italy, director Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty) heads to Dublin, Ireland—and later, New York City—for this, his droll English-language debut. Led by an engrossingly peculiar Sean Penn, and featuring a sublimely outré cameo appearance from Talking Heads’s David Byrne.

The winner of Cannes’s Un Certain Regard award in 2021 is the visceral story of a young woman’s struggle to free herself from the grip of her father—and the patriarchy with it. With the intensity of a thriller, this stirring feminist portrait announces a tremendous talent in director Kira Kovalenko.

As sharp as a knife’s blade, Radu Jude’s latest short visually quotes Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet classic Battleship Potemkin to dissect the paradoxes of the present. Holding no punches, darkly comic musings on cinema and memory expose the sheer absurdity of artmaking under bureaucratic authorities.

Filmmaking brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani made history with this provocative masterwork, the first feature to win both the Palme d’Or and the Critics Prize at Cannes. For its raw yet surreal depiction of rural life, Padre Padrone was famously championed by Roberto Rossellini and Akira Kurosawa.

Visionary director Djibril Diop Mambéty (Touki Bouki) makes a feisty assault on economic imperialism in this loose adaptation of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s play, The Visit. Relocated to a Senegalese town, Hyenas is a comic, cutting critique of globalization conveyed with playful, imaginative flourish.

Starring Burt Lancaster and Marcello Mastroianni, this past Palme d’Or contender is set in post-fascist Naples, where food prices are inflated but women’s bodies come cheap. War is often erotic in Liliana Cavani’s films—and here its economically, politically fraught aftermath plays out sexually too.

One of the most successful foreign-language debut features of recent times, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Academy Award®-nominated tale of five tenacious sisters is intelligently personal and political. Scored by Warren Ellis, this new coming-of-age classic mines the tension between tradition and progress.

Premiering at the Quinzaine in 2013, winning both the festival’s FIPRESCI Prize, and, perhaps best of all, enviable comparisons to the early work of Joel and Ethan Coen, this impeccably lean, mean revenge-thriller from Saulnier (Green Room) announced the arrival of a great new filmmaking talent.

Québécois enfant terrible Xavier Dolan won his first prize at Cannes for Mommy, a triangular family drama full of flair, with the director’s signature mid-00s soundtrack and one risky formal device—the film’s much-discussed 1:1 square aspect ratio—that in fact pays off big time.

Between Corpo Celeste & Happy as Lazzaro, writer-director Alice Rohrwacher won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival for this, her sophomore feature. An intelligent, impeccable family drama that parallels adolescence and the tension between tradition and modernity—featuring Monica Bellucci!

The scars of war are laid bare in this piercing drama from writer-director Maksym Nakonechnyi. Stylistically inventive and featuring a compelling lead performance from newcomer Rita Burkovska, Butterfly Vision is a timely testament to the trauma and resilience of women on the Ukrainian frontlines.

Juxtaposing overwhelming sorrow with an underlying joy, Abderrahmane Sissako intertwines the cruel realities of occupation with buoyant, moving moments that overwhelmingly emphasize the strength of the human spirit. Timbuktu is a political film of defiance, resilience, and poetry.

One of Merchant Ivory’s greatest films, this adaptation of the E.M. Forster classic is an emotional epic of forsaken love. With an all-star cast that includes Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Hopkins, and Helena Bonham Carter, Howards End took home three Oscars®—including Best Actress for Emma Thompson.

After 20 years in production limbo, Edo Bertoglio’s percussive No Wave time capsule uncorks to reveal a scene still fizzing with urgency. As Jean-Michel Basquiat weaves his way through the Lower East Side rubble, legends are made as hearts are broken, yet the city still throbs like an exposed vein.

Darren Aronofsky’s feverish descent into the twin worlds of addiction and discipline unleashes staggering results from actors fearless enough to submit to his vision. Before Brendan Fraser and The Whale, Ellen Burstyn got an Oscar® nod for her devastating turn as a poor, diet- and drug-addled soul.

Wild with the elemental powers of water, fire, and air, Léa Mysius’s witchy second feature inventively folds a queer love story—featuring a magnetic Adèle Exarchopoulos—in a girl’s time-hopping coming-of-age fantasy. Magic is afoot in this genre-defying family tale of desire, prejudice, and revenge.

Thirty years before Call Me By Your Name, this lavish period drama from Merchant Ivory encapsulated their uniquely tender and direct perspective on gay love. Featuring a young Hugh Grant in a passionate, heartbreaking performance, this visionary piece of queer cinema has left its mark.