Film Comment Recommends

Spiritual unity: the recently released soundtrack pulls from avant-garde jazz and traditional Persian music to create a new audio work just as madcap, ambiguous, and avant-garde as the original film was, almost 50 years ago

Gather round: Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s 1989 film is a mellow, neorealist true story about a greengrocer on the outskirts of Tokyo who took a troop of poor Chinese exchange students under his wing in 1987

Going home: Carol Mansour's documentary is a heist of sorts, depicting the ways in which exiled Palestinians, denied the right of return, keep their heritage alive

Rise up: Alain Kassanda’s documentary captures Nigeria's campus protests—and the role that cinema can play in politics

Crossing lines: one sequence captures, through the language of cinema, something fundamental about the banal violence of borders and bureaucracy

Take a look at yourself: Chilean director Sebastián Silva’s misery-suffused new comedy is ripe to the point of bursting

Another green world: with its pop imagery, sonic dissonance, and vision of life after Armageddon, Marco Ferreri’s 1969 dystopian fable brings to mind a film by George A. Romero remade by Jean-Luc Godard

Smoke gets in your eyes: Robert Altman’s jazz-infused noir finds the late legend Harry Belafonte in a role that slyly inverts his public persona as a committed and compassionate activist

Straight, no chaser: Alain Gomis’s artful remix of a 1969 French TV interview with Thelonious Monk dissects the casual racism suffered by the musical genius

Cold hearted: Hlynur Pálmason’s latest is an astute examination of the eternal failure of colonial projects when self-absorbed outsiders are tasked with getting to know the world beyond themselves