After Sean Baker’s sex work dramedy Anora won top honors at the Oscars last week, a Japanese landmark feature from Roman Porno master director Noboru Tanaka exploring the profession has been restored and is getting a U.S. release. The Oldest Profession (aka Confidential Report: Sex Market or Secret Chronicle: She Beast Market), restored in 4K from the original 35mm master negative NIKKATSU Corporation at Cineric in New York and Lisbon, is an uncompromising depiction of the realities of sex work in 1970s Japan. Ahead of theatrical screenings at NYC’s Metrograph on March 28 and 30 and Film Movement’s digital release on April 4, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the new trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “19-year-old Tome is a sex worker who draws in customers around the red-light district of Osaka. She lives with her mentally disabled younger brother, Saneo, and her mother, Yone, who is also still active as a sex worker despite being over 40 years old. One day, after receiving a request for a young girl, Tome goes to the designated inn. On arrival she encounters Yone, who is unable to find work. A few days later, Yone tells Tome that she is pregnant… 20 years have passed since the Prostitution Prevention Law was enacted, and the red-light district is now gone. Nonetheless, sex work as a profession persists. Noboru Tanaka’s controversial film (also known as ‘Lusty Beast Market’) portrays sorrowful but strong and resilient women who have no other choice but to earn a living by selling their bodies.”

See the trailer below for the film starring Meika Seri, Genshu Hanayagi, Shiro Yumemura, Moeko Ezawa, Junko Miyashita, and Sakumi Hagiwara.

While this is, admittedly, Not A Movie, Hideo Kojima has perhaps come closest to bridging the video game-cinema divide, either through decades of indispensable work or the recent assistance of A24. It helps collecting onscreen talent that would make any producer blush: as revealed in trailers dating all the way back to 2022, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach returns Léa Seydoux, Norman Reedus, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Guillermo del Toro from its predecessor while adding to the fold George Miller, Fatih Akin, Elle Fanning, Luca Marinelli, and Shioli Kutsuna. With the announcement of a June 26 release comes the project’s new trailer, edited by Kojima himself.

Per his standards, Kojima hasn’t revealed too great a deal––little surprise from a man who’d craft games around characters seen across zero marketing––but there’s no mistaking its borderline-vérité visual sense, off-center comic sensibility, melodramatic pathos, or apocalyptic foreshadowing for anyone else.

Watch below:

Following No Other Land‘s major Oscar win earlier this week, more films capturing the plight of the Palestinian people are getting wider distribution here in the United States. This spring, Oscar-nominated director Farah Nabulsi’s TIFF-selected drama The Teacher, starring Saleh Bakri and Imogen Poots, will get a release from Watermelon Pictures. Ahead of an April 11 release, the first trailer and poster have now arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “A Palestinian school teacher (Saleh Bakri, The Band’s Visit) struggles to reconcile his risky commitment to political resistance with his emotional support for one of his students (Muhammad Abed El Rahman) and the chance of a new relationship with a volunteer worker (Imogen Poots, The Father).”

Jared Mobarak said in his TIFF review, “Writer-director Farah Nabulsi brilliantly showcased the abject futility of living under occupation with her Oscar-nominated short The Present a couple years ago. By taking the seemingly mundane act of going shopping for an anniversary gift and portraying how cruelly impossible it can become when people with guns take it upon themselves to make it so, she evoked the tired frustration and unavoidable rage that Palestinians must endure on a daily basis. It should come as no surprise, then, that her feature debut The Teacher would follow suit, mirroring the additional runtime with a much more robust example.”

See the trailer below.

I wish there were an exact subgenre for Robina Rose’s Nightshift so I could see every single one of its kin. The British feature––recalling the austere melancholy of Chantal Akerman or films of its cinematographer, Jon Jost––has spent 40-plus years as an object of complete obscurity, knowledge beguiles while watching it: a masterclass in where to put the camera, where to cut, and where to put the camera again to follow, complicate, or upend where you put the camera before. Don’t go to film school; just watch Nightshift over and over.

The Lightbox Film Center, the British Film Institute, and Cinenova have restored Rose’s film, which Arbelos opens at Anthology Film Archives for a one-week run on March 14. Ahead of this we are thrilled to debut a trailer that perfectly encapsulates Nightshift.

Here’s the synopsis: “Over the course of a single nightshift, a West London hotel clerk (U.K. counterculture icon Jordan, and previously the star of Derek Jarman’s Jubliee) plays mute witness to a nocturnal constellation of guests ranging from punk rockers and scenester magicians to seemingly staid businessmen and old-world gentry. As the hours march deeper into night and the varied clientele depart the waking world, the hotel transforms into an otherworldly, liminal space swaying between the everyday and the enchanting. Gorgeously photographed by filmmaker Jon Jost, with a soundtrack by Simon Jeffes of the legendary Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Nightshift is both a potent snapshot of London’s early-1980s art scene (actor/poet Heathcote Williams and filmmaker Anne Rees-Mogg also star) and a bold, instantly engrossing artistic statement from director Robina Rose. Newly restored by Lightbox Film Center, and back in circulation thanks to Arbelos Films, Nightshift is a beguiling masterwork of surreal, somnambulant cinema that casts a resonant and bewitching spell.”

Six years since his last solo directing feature, Her Smell, Alex Ross Perry returned to the world of rock in a very different way with Pavements. A tribute to Stephen Malkmus’ group, the film jumps between band documentary, biopic (and the making of the biopic), Broadway-musical creation, museum exhibition, and more to try containing the genius of this influential group. After its fall festival premiere, Utopia will give it a release this year and they’ve now released the first trailer for the fake biopic Range Life within the film. The “film” stars Joe Keery as frontman Stephen Malkmus, alongside Jason Schwartzman, Fred Hechinger, Tim Heidecker, Logan Miller, Griffin Newman, Nat Wolff, and more.

David Katz said in his review, “Perry’s film, one of his most accomplished and complete-feeling to date, exists in both a past and conditional tense. It gives a brilliant précis of one of indie music’s most influential artists: in its most conventional passages, it’s a visual and critical biography identifying the key features of their suburban and middle-American backgrounds, their initiation into “alt” culture and the art life as students, and their sometimes loving, often tentative rapport with the 90s’ big-money music industry. But after establishing this baseline of reality, Perry and his mock-doc-making, fake-it-so-real editor Robert Greene (who seems a larger artistic collaborator here) devise highly inventive fictional segments that aren’t necessarily plausible but have a persuasive, satirical feel a few semitones off-pitch from reality.”

See the trailer below.

It’s not the only film Alex Ross Perry is debuting this year as his absorbing three-hour ode to the video store, Videoheaven, just premiered at Rotterdam (read our review here) and the first poster has arrived.

After making a splash with his uncompromising incest drama Saint-Narcisse, underground Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce returned to Berlinale last year with The Visitor, his explicit take on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema. Ahead of a release from Circle Collective starting this Friday at Roxy Cinema in New York followed by Landmark NuArt in Los Angeles on March 14, with additional cities, the X-rated trailer has now arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “London, today. A refugee washes up naked in a suitcase on the bank of the Thames. The enigmatic, sexually fluid stranger introduces himself to a bourgeois, upper class family. He is invited to stay on as an employee. The Visitor soon seduces each member of the family in a series of explicit sexual encounters. He will turn their world upside down as they are able to redefine themselves in new, radical ways.”

Savina Petkova said in her review, “Pasolini takes aim at the fascistic upper class and turns the use of sex and humiliation as a means of control against its members, but LaBruce brings an effervescence to every bit of the original. Stylistically, The Visitor updates Teorema by making it look ultramodern. Colorist Andrea Gómez drowns the frame in sultry reds and bottomless blues, strobing intercuts a scene time and time again, and the screen is often split in four, each bit with its own angle and color. The multiplication of images, lights, and tints forms a rhythm of its own to guide us through the plot of a porn movie: a mansion, a knock on the door, surprise, sexual appetite, consummation, transformation, end.”

See the X-rated trailer below, along with a SFW version.

F*CK FOR THE MANY NOT THE FEW

THE VISITOR's X-Rated Trailer has landed. From @apoliticalorg & @CircleCollectv, feast your eyes and ears on the 'King of Kink' @BruceLaBruce's "brilliantly depraved" cinematic experience c*mming to theaters near you https://t.co/87GSukEy1S pic.twitter.com/QRXqj4muP1

— Circle Collective (@CircleCollectv) March 4, 2025

Named one of the 10 best films of Cahiers du Cinéma back in 2023, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s crime thriller The Temple Woods Gang is finally getting a proper U.S. release later this year from Several Futures. However, New York City audiences will have a chance to see it next week as part of a special screening at L’Alliance New York. The March 12 screening will be followed by a conversation with Paola Raiman, Chloé Folens, and Taddeo Reihnardt, film programmers from Le Clef Revival in Paris as part of their NYC tour, and critic/translator Nicholas Elliott. Ahead of the special event, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the U.S. trailer and poster.

Here’s the synopsis: “A gang of small-time criminals in a working-class French suburb stage a daring heist against a mysterious foreign tycoon and pay the consequences in the latest and possibly greatest feature from under-sung French-Algerian master Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche. With a plot as taut—and thrilling—as the best of Jean-Pierre Melville, The Temple Woods Gang ranges wide thematically, offering both a nuanced vision of the banlieue and an incisive analysis of contemporary class relations and the circulation of global capital. But perhaps the film’s most affecting aspect is its representation of community and the deep ties that cement it.”

See the exclusive trailer and poster below.

After getting her start in collaborations with Derek Jarman, Sally Potter, and Joanna Hogg––and before she would breakthrough in films by Danny Boyle, Cameron Crowe, Spike Jonze, Jim Jarmusch, and more––Tilda Swinton made her U.S. debut with an erotic drama that unfortunately has gone little-seen. The distributor Hope Runs High is here to change that as Susan Streitfeld’s 1996 feature Female Perversions, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival, has been restored and is returning to theaters.

The film follows Swinton as a bi-sexual lawyer on the edge of professional breakthrough, personal breakdown, and sexual awakening, with a cast also including Amy Madigan, Karen Sillas, Frances Fisher, Laila Robins, Paulina Porizkova, Clancy Brown.

The restoration, backed by Vinegar Syndrome/Cinématographe in 2024, was completed from a 4K, 16-bit scan of the 35mm original camera negative by Vinegar Syndrome in Bridgeport, Connecticut, via an ARRISCAN XT. Frame-by-frame manual digital restoration, color grading, and transferring of the original stereo optical track sound was also completed by Vinegar Syndrome.

Watch the trailer below via IndieWire ahead of the restoration’s premiere this Saturday in LA at American Cinematheque and it’ll then stop by NYC’s Nitehawk on March 6, with more cities to come.

One of the pleasures of the Museum of Modern Art’s Luis Buñuel retrospective last year was my first-time viewing of Él, a wonderfully entertaining tale of obsession and a clear influence on Alfred Hitchcock for Vertigo. Janus Films will now give the new restoration of the 1953 classic a proper run, opening at Film Forum on March 14, and they’ve debuted a new trailer and poster.

Here’s the synopsis: “Among the strangest and most perturbing films of his overlooked Mexican period, Él is Luis Buñuel’s incisive portrait of paranoia, jealousy, and sexual obsession—a nightmarish tale of love gone wrong that prefigures the major themes of his 1960s and ’70s work. Incorporating his personal demons into an adaptation of Mercedes Pinto’s autobiographical novel, Buñuel tells the story of Francisco Galván de Montemayor (Arturo de Córdova), a devout middle-aged bachelor who falls into amour fou with Gloria (Delia Garcés). After breaking her engagement with another man, Gloria realizes something is terribly off about Francisco, whose sophisticated facade masks deep insecurities and an explosive, violent temper. Descending into madness, Francisco drives Gloria to fear for her life—with no refuge offered by either her family or the church. One of Buñuel’s rawest, angriest indictments of religious and social hypocrisy, Él stands as the surrealist master’s great excursion into dark melodrama, where civilization can find no answer to the raging urges of the irrational id.”

This 4K restoration was scanned from a dupe positive preserved by Películas y Vídeos Internacionales at the Filmoteca de la UNAM. Color grading was supervised by Gabriel Figueroa Flores. The restoration work was completed at L’Immagine Ritrovata in 2022. The Film Foundation extends special thanks to Guillermo del Toro and Daniela Michel.

See the trailer and poster below.

One of our most-anticipated films to premiere at TIFF last fall, The Assessment marked the directorial debut of Fleur Fortuné, who had previously helmed music videos for M83, The Avalanches, Lykke Li, Travis Scott, and more. The sci-fi drama, starring Alicia Vikander, Elizabeth Olsen, Himesh Patel, Minnie Driver, Indira Varma, Nicholas Pinnock, Charlotte Ritchie, and Leah Harvey, was picked up by Magnolia Pictures, who have now debuted the first trailer ahead of a March 21 release.

Here’s the synopsis: “The Assessment follows Mia (Olsen) and Aaryan (Patel), a successful couple who hope to become parents in a near future where resources are extremely limited and the government keeps firm control over reproduction. They are assigned an assessor named Virginia (Vikander), who moves into their home for seven days to evaluate whether they deserve to move forward in their parenting journey. What Mia and Aaryan are hoping is a routine test quickly unravels into a psychological nightmare, forcing them to question the very foundations of their society and what it truly means to be human.”

Jared Mobarak said in his review, “The test is about more than mere supervision––though that’s pretty important when you consider the myriad ways a young child could get themselves killed in and around a home that’s never heard the word “childproof.” It’s also about patience. Empathy. Responsibility. Mia and Aaryan are very career-oriented and living in a world where children aren’t allowed renders it difficult to flip the switch that shifts work into second place. So Virginia pushes them. And pushes some more until the fact that she is very much not a child begins to taint the results. At some point you wonder how this became the process––it seems more like setting them up to fail than preparing them to succeed.”

See the trailer below.

Premiering last year at Tribeca Festival, just before he was seen in Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, Michael Angarano’s second directorial feature Sacramento brought together the impressive cast of Michael Cera, Kristen Stewart, and Maya Erskine, along with the actor-director-writer-producer himself. Picked up by Vertical, who will release the drama theatrically on April 11, they’ve now debuted the first trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “Following the death of his father, energetic and free-spirited Rickey (Michael Angarano) convinces long-time friend Glenn (Michael Cera) to go on an impromptu road trip from Los Angeles to Sacramento. Frustrated by Rickey’s Peter Pan complex, Glenn is encouraged by his pregnant wife Rosie (Kristen Stewart) to go on the adventure to reconnect. In the worn yellow seats of Glenn’s old college convertible, the two men confront their anxiety-ridden lives, addressing past mistakes and questioning what their futures hold.”

See the trailer below.

Following Hermia & Helena and Isabella, Matías Piñeiro’s new film You Burn Me playfully, gorgeously adapts “Sea Foam,” a chapter in Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò. Centered around fictional dialogue between the ancient Greek poet Sappho and the nymph Britomartis (played by Gabi Saidón and María Villar, respectively), Piñeiro’s latest is a feat of effervescent poetic beauty, melding poignant words with stunning images to a dizzying, transcendent effect. With the Berlinale and NYFF selection picked up by Cinema Guild for a release beginning next week, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the first trailer.

You Burn Me will open on Friday, March 7 at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, accompanied by a special series curated by Matías himself, including works by Michelangelo Antonioni, Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Mariano Llinas, and more. For those in Los Angeles, don’t miss the LA premiere on March 15 at American Cinematheque as part of a series featuring films by the director. The film’s North American theatrical release includes the brand-new, standalone six-minute short Preface for the Little Dialogue, featuring the director’s voiceover as an introduction to the feature.

Here’s the synopsis: “An adaptation of ‘Sea Foam,’ a chapter in Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò, Piñeiro’s latest is an intimate and expansive meditation on death and desire and a thrilling exploration of the possibilities of adapting text to film. In ‘Sea Foam,’ Pavese stages a fictional dialogue between the ancient Greek poet Sappho and the nymph Britomartis (played by frequent Piñeiro collaborators Gabi Saidón and María Villar). Sappho has thrown herself into the ocean from heartbreak. Britomartis has fallen off a cliff into the water while fleeing a man. Reuniting at the shore, they discuss life, death and the bittersweet nature of desire. But Piñeiro, known for his series of metatextual films dealing with the translation and performance of Shakespeare, is not content to simply restage a dialogue and instead infuses the film with footnotes and lacunae: the fragmentary poetry of Sappho, by whom only one complete poem still exists; the circumstances of Pavese’s death, heartbroken in a Turin hotel room; and the science of sea foam with its connections to disease and fertility. In this ebb and flow of death and desire, You Burn Me introduces a game of translation and memorization, a game intrinsic to the moving image that may just save Sappho, Pavese, Piñeiro and the audience from oblivion.”

See the exclusive trailer below.