Le Bonheur—translation "Happiness"—is an underrated masterpiece by Agnes Varda, one of, if not the, greatest filmmaker of the French New Wave, and perhaps her most shocking, subversive feminist statement.

With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, a crime drama shot in an intensely intimate vérité style.

Jim Jarmusch's breakout feature is essential indie cinema. Starring John Lurie, Richard Edson, and violinist Eszter Balint, the rudderless road movie unfolds over a succession of long takes shot in washed-out black and white, with Jarmusch's hipster bona fides already on full display.

Celebrated filmmaker Kelly Reichardt's autumnal heist movie stars Josh O’Connor as amateur art thief J.B Mooney, who sets out on his first theft with what he thinks is an airtight plan. Also starring Alana Haim, Gaby Hoffmann, John Magaro, Hope Davis, and Bill Camp.

Featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, the documentary Monk in Pieces is a mosaic that illuminates Monk’s wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery.

With her life crashing down around her, Linda (Rose Byrne) attempts to navigate her child's mysterious illness, her absent husband, a missing person, and an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist (Conan O'Brien) in Mary Bronstein's long-in-the-works follow up to her anxiety-ridden debut, Yeast.

In suburban Connecticut in 1973, the Hood and Carver families try to navigate a Thanksgiving break simmering with unspoken resentment, sexual tension, and cultural confusion. With clarity, subtlety, and a dose of wicked humor, Academy Award–winning director Ang Lee renders Rick Moody’s acclaimed novel of yuppie American malaise as a trenchant, tragic cinematic portrait of lost souls.

Joachim Trier’s Grand Prix-winning follow-up to the runaway art house hit The Worst Person in the World, stars Renate Reinsve as an actress forced to confront her long-estranged filmmaker father (Stellan Skarsgård, getting long-overdue accolades).

Noir veers into apocalyptic sci-fi in Robert Aldrich’s 1955 masterpiece Kiss Me Deadly. Brazen and bleak, Kiss Me Deadly is an essential piece of Cold War paranoia, with as nervy an ending as has ever been seen in American cinema.

The Night of the Hunter is a permanent fixture in the pantheon of one-and-done cinematic masterpieces. Acclaimed actor Charles Laughton directed this intensely expressionistic Grimm Fairytale, starring Robert Mitchum in his greatest villainous performance, and never helmed another movie again.

Touch of Evil is one of the most outlandish noir films around, and not without its unsavory aspects. It's also one of the most thrillingly stylized films in the whole genre, with its infamous one-shot opening scene setting the bar impossibly high.

Sofia Coppola's luminous debut feature situated the young writer-director as her generations' foremost chronicler of the interior lives of young women as well as the heir apparent in a sprawling filmmaking family.

The late Taiwanese master Edward Yang's extraordinary Yi Yi is his final film and his best-known masterwork. No mere summary can truly capture the enormity of Yang's achievement here, or his genius for creating a fully actualized urban environment populated by people with rich and complex inner lives.

Bret Easton Ellis considered his controversial novel unfilmable but boy did writer-director Mary Harron prove him wrong. Anchored by an instantly iconic performance by a young and hungry Christian Bale, Harron turns Ellis' repugnant satire into something far more ambiguous, farcical, frightening, and enduring.

VTIFF celebrates the holidays with this annual tradition: a festive screening of Wong Kar-wai's sumptuous yuletide masterpiece, a delicately mannered and visually extravagant evocation of romantic longing that has glided into the conversation of the best films ever made.