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THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL
Ti West is now best known for his X Trilogy—X, Pearl, and MaXXXine-and, bizarrely, this Thanksgiving he'll drop his Gothic take on A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer. But his breakout was The House of the Devil, and it still rips nearly two decades on. Sometimes lumped into the so-called "mumblegore" microgenre, alongside up-and-comers like Adam Wingard (You're Next, Godzilla Vs. Kong), David Bruckner (The Ritual), and Joe Swanberg (V/H/S), what sets this satanic panic revival film apart is its fully realized throwback swagger (in name it even references arguably the first ever horror film, Georges Méliès' three-minute magic show from 1896).
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GHOSTWATCH
Well before audiences were accustomed to found-footage movies—thanks in large part to The Blair Witch Project giving away the game—Ghostwatch set the template for how to catch viewers completely unawares, and it worked smashingly. Featuring real BBC personalities and reporters investigating “the most haunted house in Britain,” Ghostwatch adopted the format of a genuine live broadcast, War of the Worlds-style—taking place in more or less real time, expert parapsychologists on hand to unpack the goings on, and operators standing by to take your calls. But what starts out as a cheeky Halloween edition of the similarly titled Crimewatch goes terribly wrong, leaving shocked BBC viewers wondering what to believe.
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ROADS TO OLYMPIA
Three young athletes—a closeted Russian decathlete, a Saudi woman struggling against the patriarchy, and a Brazilian wrestler escaping crime—face cultural oppression, intolerance, and poverty as they pursue a shared dream to compete in the Olympic Games.
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ALL THAT JAZZ
The preternaturally gifted director and choreographer Bob Fosse turned the camera on his own life for this madly imaginative, self-excoriating musical masterpiece, starring Roy Scheider in the performance of his career.
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NAZA
Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the filmmakers behind the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, NAZA was shot covertly at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv and focuses on conversations with the people involved in the calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians.
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MUSICAL SILENTS: A TRIP TO MARS
In Holger-Madsen’s groundbreaking silent space adventure, a group of Danish astronauts land on Mars and discover a utopian, vegetarian society populated by people who look like... attractive Danes headed to a toga party.
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MY UNDESIRABLE FRIENDS: PART II—EXILE
In the expansive and equally intimate second chapter of her monumental procedural tracking a group of Russian dissidents, Julia Loktev picks up precisely where she left off, following the journalists branded as “foreign agents” as the disperse across Europe and beyond.
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DOWN BY LAW
Jim Jarmusch followed up his breakout film Stranger Than Paradise with this equally beloved portrait of three hapless misfits on the run in Louisiana: an unemployed disc jockey (Tom Waits), a small-time pimp (John Lurie), and an Italian tourist (Roberto Benigni).
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THE RULES OF THE GAME
One of the greatest films ever made, The Rules of the Game is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners, as a weekend of goings-on at a country château riles a group of haut-bourgeois acquaintances.
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THE KILLING
Stanley Kubrick’s account of an ambitious racetrack robbery is one of Hollywood’s tautest, twistiest noirs. And with its precise tracking shots and gratifying sense of irony, it’s Kubrick to the core.
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THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD
Renate Reinsve won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for the revelatory, complex performance that anchors this sprawlingly novelistic film by Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier.
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PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE
Passion brews quietly between an artist and her subject, until together they create a space in which it can briefly flourish, in this sumptuous 18th-century romance from Céline Sciamma, one of contemporary French cinema’s most acclaimed auteurs.
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CLUE
VTIFF remembers the great Tim Curry (1946-2026), who walks away with this '80s whodunit board game adaptation among a stacked cast that also includes Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Lesley Ann Warren, and Martin Mull.
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THE TURIN HORSE
The Hungarian genius Béla Tarr's (1955-2026) final film is one of his best, composed in his signature long takes and immaculately photographed in stark black and white, an epic invocation of a famous anecdote about Friedrich Nietzsche.
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9 TO 5
If you’re going to honor Dolly cinematically, only 9 to 5 will do. The plot is basic: three female employees (Dolly, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda) working for a horrible, sexist boss come up with an elaborate plan to turn the tables.
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FANNY AND ALEXANDER
In Ingmar Bergman's warmest and most autobiographical film, we witness the delights and conflicts of a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-20th-century Sweden through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander.
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THE SILENT PARTNER
Don't let your kid sit on this Santa’s knee! One of the great unheralded movies of the ’70s, Silent Partner is a taut thriller with great performances, featuring one of the nastiest Santas to ever grace the screen. Starring Elliot Gould and Christopher Plummer.
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IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
Okay, so Wong Kar-wai's modern classic itself has nothing to do with Christmas, but it’s a perfect film, and it’s a VTIFF tradition to spend some part of the holiday with Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Maggie Cheung Man Yuk in Hong Kong, 1962.
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