Intimate Epics

Considered the greatest martial-arts epic of all time, King Hu’s jaw-dropping masterpiece is part wuxia film, part ghost story, and part metaphysical reflection on Buddhist philosophy.

An Inuit oral legend comes to the big screen in this pulse-pounding, awe-inspiring action drama set in ancient Igloolik, where a life-altering struggle ensues between human and supernatural forces.

The epic swan song of Russian auteur Aleksei German is a dreamlike adaptation of the beloved 1964 sci-fi novel about a scientist facing bedlam and brutality on a medieval planet.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s consciousness-bending landmark of philosophical science fiction follows a psychologist dispatched to a space station, only to confront a ghost from his past.

An all-time favorite of Martin Scorsese, Luchino Visconti’s lavish masterpiece charts the fall of a noble family, with Burt Lancaster as an aging patriarch in 1860s Sicily amid the tumult of reunification.

Terrence Malick made a long-awaited return to the director’s chair with this harrowing, Oscar-nominated adaptation of James Jones’ World War II novel about an American platoon in the Pacific theater.

After going to prison for a crime she didn’t commit, a Filipino woman seeks revenge in Lav Diaz’s class-conscious exploration of personal retribution and uncommon mercy, filmed in startling black-and-white.

One of the year's most essential cinematic events, writer-director Laura Citarella’s mischievous, monumental mystery centers around the search for a missing biologist by the men in her life.