A display of celluloid bungee-jumping.
—Baltimore Sun

Richard Linklater (Slacker) directs this innovative feature that superimposes brightly hued digital animation on live-action digital video, transforming reality into a sophisticated cartoon. A trippy meditation on consciousness that pleases, puzzles and provokes. (2001, 99 minutes)

Suspended breathtakingly between mirage and miracle. —Village Voice

Charlotte Rampling delivers a sensual and moving performance as a long-married literature professor whose husband disappears at the beach. This Hitchcockian exploration of grief is cool-eyed, compelling and comically strange. From France. (François Ozon, 2000, 95 minutes)

Resplendent from the first frame to the last.
—Los Angeles Times

A luminous roundelay, as three men and three women tumble in and out of one another’s minds, hearts and arms. Jacques Rivette (Celine and Julie Go Boating, La belle noiseuse) directs this rich and subtle sex farce that opened the 2001 New York Film Festival. From France. (2001, 150 minutes)

One of the swooniest movies ever made about love. —The New York Times

Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung star as a couple caught in a vortex of quiet passion in this voluptuous and gorgeously shot film set in 1962 Hong Kong. Wong Kar-wai (Chungking Express) directs this romance of unrequited, tender longing. (2000, 97 minutes)

A powerful story of resisting despair and acting with dignity. —Montreal Film Festival

Shot on the mean streets of Casablanca, using a mostly non-professional cast, this film follows three homeless teens attempting to give a proper burial to their friend Ali, killed by a rival gang. Like Los Olvidados and Pixote before it, Ali Zaoua pulls no punches. (Nabil Ayouch, 2001, 95 minutes)

Tumultuous, tender, and horrifying as real life. —Village Voice

Like a mix of Tennessee Williams and John Waters in South America, Lucrecia Martel’s biting debut film is a languorous look at two Argentine families playing out their sordid domestic dramas on a decaying country estate. This film wowed the crowd at Sundance. (2001, 103 minutes)

A film of consummate beauty and intensity.
—Sundance Film Festival

Daily, migrant workers cut down Brazilian forests to provide charcoal for the pig iron industry. Academy Award-winning director Nigel Noble has crafted this documentary that leads us from the environmental problem into the heart of the tragedy that the charcoal people live, destroying nature to survive. (1999, 70 minutes)

Great fantasy, great filmmaking—beguiling on any level. —Leonard Maltin

Poet, painter, filmmaker Jean Cocteau directs this lyrical version of the classic “love conquers all” fairy tale. Starring hunky Jean Marais as the Beast, lovely Josette Day as Beauty and the luminous photography of Henri Alekan. We will screen a new 35 mm print. (1946, 90 minutes)

An intellectually breathtaking, profoundly moving film. —BBC

This Grand Prize-winner at Sundance languished without a distributor for a year because of its charged subject matter. Based on true events, The Believer is about a yeshiva student who turns into a neo-Nazi. Anchored by a ferocious performance by Ryan Gosling, this explosive film explores good and evil. (Henry Bean, 2001, 98 minutes)