Staff Picks

Staff Picks

Newly updated! Favorites from the staff at OVID.

Share
Staff Picks
  • Lolita (Adrian Lyne)

    Directed by Adrian Lyne • Drama • With Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, Melanie Griffith, Frank Langella • 1997 • 137 minutes

    Humbert, a brilliant professor of French literature in New England, rents a room from a lonely widow, Charlotte, who falls in love with him. She is a giddy and talkative la...

  • Escapes: The Life of Actor and Screenwriter, Hampton Fancher

    Directed by Michael Almereyda • Documentary • With Hampton Fancher • 2017 • 89 minutes

    Directed by Michael Almereyda (Experimenter) and executive produced by Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel), Escapes blazes a wild path through mid-20th-century Hollywood via the experiences of Hampton Fanc...

  • La Moustache

    Directed by Emmanuel Carrère • Drama • With Vincent Lindon, Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric • 2005 • 86 minutes

    Marc Thiriez (Vincent Lindon) is an architect who's worn a mustache for many years. Now approaching middle age, he decides to shave it off, naturally expecting others to notice. But ...

  • Time Regained

    Directed by Raúl Ruiz • Drama • With Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart, Vincent Perez • 2018 • 163 minutes

    Raúl Ruiz’s most ambitious literary adaptation and considered his greatest cinematic achievement.  An Official Selection at both the Cannes and New York Film Festivals and starring an out...

  • Museum Hours (Jem Cohen)

    Directed by Jem Cohen • Drama • With Mary Margaret O’Hara, Robert “Bobby” Sommer, Ela Piplits • 2012 • 106 minutes

    When a Vienna museum guard befriends an enigmatic visitor, the grand Kunsthistorisches Art Museum becomes a mysterious crossroads which sparks explorations of their lives, the city,...

  • A Man on his Knees

    Movie

    Mistaken as a witness to a crime, Nino (Giuliano Gemma, The Iron Prefect), learns from a friend he has been put on a Mafia hit list and is being stalked by an assassin (Michele Placido, Romanzo Criminale). A man with a troubled past, Nino knows only too well what he faces and uses all his strengt...

  • Niki
    Movie

    Niki

    Movie

    The debut feature of actor-turned-director Céline Sallette, Niki is a vibrant portrait of French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle (Charlotte Le Bon, star of The White Lotus), one of the most iconoclastic figures of the contemporary art world.

    Fleeing the oppressive atmosphere of post-war Ame...

  • Who By Fire

    Movie

    A getaway at a secluded log cabin in the forest becomes the site of escalating, multigenerational tensions and anxieties in this disquieting, impeccably mounted coming-of-age drama from Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage. Ostensibly a merry reunion between well-known film director Blake Cadieux ...

  • The Dmitriev Affair (Jessica Gorter)

    Directed by Jessica Gorter • Documentary • 2024 • 96 minutes

    Yuri Dmitriev exhumes what the Russian rulers would rather forget. After years of searching the pine forests of Karelia in northwestern Russia, he discovers a mass grave containing thousands of people who were secretly executed during ...

  • Genesis 2.0

    Movie

    On the remote New Siberian Islands in the Arctic Ocean, hunters searching for tusks of extinct mammoths discover a surprisingly well-preserved mammoth carcass. Resurrecting the woolly mammoth is a first manifestation of the next great technological revolution - genetics. Werner Herzog meets Juras...

  • Leila (Dariush Mehrjui, w/ Leila Hatami)

    Directed by Dariush Mehrjui • Drama • With Leila Hatami, Ali Mosaffa • 1999 • 125 minutes

    Reza and Leila, an attractive and affluent young couple deeply in love and recently married, discover that Leila is unable to conceive. Invoking tradition, Reza's mother convinces her daughter-in-law that R...

  • Beautiful Losers

    Directed by Aaron Rose, Joshua Leonard • Documentary • With Thomas Campbell, Harmony Korine, Shepard Fairy, Jo Jackson, Chris Johanson, Mike Mills, Steve Espo Powers • 2009 • 90 minutes

    BEAUTIFUL LOSERS celebrates the spirit behind one of the most influential cultural moments of a generation. In...

  • The 317th Platoon

    Directed by Pierre Schoendoerffer • Drama • With Jacques Perrin, Bruno Cremer, Pierre Fabre • 1965 • 95 minutes

    1954. The dying days of the French war in Indochina. As the battle of Diên Biên Phu rages, the 317th platoon of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps are ordered to destroy their bas...

  • The Children of 209 Saint-Maur Street

    Directed by Ruth Zylberman • Documentary • 2020 • 100 minutes

    209 rue St. Maur is a classic Parisian apartment building in the 10th arrondissement: Stone, built around a courtyard, shops on the bottom floor. In the first decades of the 20th century, it was home to some 300 working class people, ...

  • The Plains

    Directed by David Easteal • Drama • With Andrew Rakowski, David Easteal • 2022 • 180 minutes

    Every evening a man in his late 50s commutes home at the end of the working day in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. As the seasons pass in gentle rhythm we observe dramatic events of his life as well as m...

  • Full Time (w/ Laure Calamy)

    Directed by Éric Gravel • Drama • With Laure Calamy • 2023 • 88 minutes

    Julie (Laure Calamy) can’t catch a break. For a single mother raising two children in the suburbs of Paris but working in the city, the commuter train is a lifeline–and it’s suddenly been severed during the latest transit st...

  • El Mar La Mar

    Directed by Joshua Bonnetta & J.P. Sniadecki • Documentary • 2017 • 94 minutes

    An immersive and enthralling journey through the Sonoran Desert on the U.S.-Mexico border, EL MAR LA MAR weaves together harrowing oral histories from the area with hand-processed 16mm images of flora, fauna and items...

  • David Holzman's Diary

    Directed by Jim McBride • Drama • With Eileen Dietz, Kit Carson • 1967 • 73 minutes

    David Holzman's Diary is one of the most influential films of the 1960s, an "ingenious puzzle movie" (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader) that charts the self-destruction of a media-saturated youth. As news from the Viet...

  • Bless Their Little Hearts

    Directed by Billy Woodberry • Drama • With Nate Hardman, Kaycee Moore • 1983 • 80 minutes

    Searching for steady work, Charlie (Nate Hardman) views his chronic unemployment as a kind of spiritual trial. But selling a few catfish can’t sustain a family of five while his wife, Andais (Kaycee Moore)...

  • The Botanical Avatar of Mademoiselle Flora

    Directed by Jeanne Barbillon • Drama • With Bernadette Lafont, Louis Mesuret • 1965 • 15 minutes

    In a small French town, Flora (Bernadette Lafont) has a six-week fling with a soldier. But this is no passionate affair. Her lover, the cartoonish Charles (Louis Mesuret), ignores her advances, insis...

  • Geographies of Solitude

    Directed by Jacquelyn Mills • Documentary • 2022 • 103 minutes

    An immersion into the rich ecosystem of Sable Island, a remote sliver of land in the Northwest Atlantic, the film follows Zoe Lucas, a naturalist and environmentalist who has lived there for over 40 years collecting, cleaning and doc...

  • What Happened Was...

    Directed by Tom Noonan • Drama • With Tom Noonan, Karen Sillas • 1993 • 91 minutes

    Winner of the Grand Jury Prize and the Screenwriting Award at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, WHAT HAPPENED WAS... is Tom Noonan's directorial debut; a darkly humorous take on dating dread. Featuring powerhouse p...

  • Searching For Gerda Taro

    Directed by Camille Ménager • Documentary • 2021 • 58 minutes

    SEARCHING FOR GERDA TARO celebrates the life and work of Taro — a charismatic Jewish refugee from Germany, an anti-fascist, and a trailblazing photographer whose work would be forgotten for decades.

    In 1935, Taro (then going by her b...

  • The Bomb

    Directed by Kevin Ford, Smriti Keshari, Eric Schlosser • Documentary • 2016 • 61 minutes

    Over seven decades have passed since a city was destroyed by a nuclear weapon. But the danger never went away. We are now confronted with a world in which nine nations possess about 15,000 nuclear weapons. M...