Known for Directing
Alex Ross Perry is an American filmmaker and actor. He has written and directed a series of feature films centred on unconventional characters and rife with the anxieties and joys of creation. His films have been internationally acclaimed at film festivals such as Sundance, Toronto, Locarno, Berlin, and others. He is most known for Listen Up Philip, which premiered in 2014 at the Sundance Film Festival and later won the Special Jury Prize at the 2014 Locarno International Film Festival, and Her Smell (2018), which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and screened at the New York Film Festival the same year. Besides being a prolific independent filmmaker with many of his fiction feature films internationally recognised, he also experimented with documentary, non-fiction, and music. His documentary-fiction hybrid, Pavements (2024), is an experimental musical biopic concert film that premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
Born
July 14, 1984 (age 42)
Birthplace
Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, USA
Filmography
66 films, 4 shows


V/H/S/Halloween
2025 · 1h 55m
country: United States
A collection of Halloween-themed videotapes unleashes a series of twisted, blood-soaked tales, turning trick-or-treat into a struggle for survival.


Videoheaven
2025 · 2h 52m
country: United States
Since the 1980s, the video shop has been a desperately necessary space for film culture. In Videoheaven, Alex Ross Perry tells the story of the neighbourhood video shop to consider wider, changing social histories, using appropriated footage from the high and lowbrow.


Pavements
2025 · 2h 8m
country: United States
'90s indie-rock band Pavement reunites for their sold-out 2022 tour. But as preparations get underway, surreal tributes emerge: an off-Broadway musical adaptation of their songs, a museum devoted entirely to the band’s legacy, and a shamelessly awards-baiting Hollywood biopic.


Rite Here Rite Now
2024 · 2h 24m
country: United States
Whether you’re a devoted disciple looking to relive treasured memories of the GHOST live spectacle or among the curious uninitiated, RITE HERE RITE NOW will put you right there: putting your phones down and living in the moment—as a shadow of uncertainty looms—completely spellbound and in the thrall of this bombastic yet intimate cinematic portrait of GHOST.


Metal Myths: Ghost Pt. 2
2022 · 28m
country: Sweden
A mockumentary detailing the history of the Swedish rock band Ghost.


Paul Schrader: Man in a Room
2020 · 33m
country: United States
In the sixth installment of the Criterion Channel's Meet the Filmmakers series, director Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell, Listen Up Philip) visits the ever-iconoclastic auteur Paul Schrader during the making of his 2017 masterpiece First Reformed. On set and at home- where, for his own pleasure, he continues to work and rework his previous films- Schrader reflects on the highs and lows of his legendary career, the challenges and rewards of slow cinema, and the influences and experiences that continue to shape his approach to filmmaking. With this insightful portrait of one of his filmmaking heroes, Perry captures an artist who is continually at play, intentionally provocative, and never less than vital.


Her Smell
2019 · 2h 16m
country: Greece
A self-destructive punk rocker struggles with sobriety while trying to recapture the creative inspiration that led her band to success.


Golden Exits
2018 · 1h 34m
country: Greece
An intersectional narrative of two families in Brooklyn and the unraveling of unspoken unhappiness that occurs when a young foreign girl spending time abroad upsets the balance on both sides.


Queen of Earth
2015 · 1h 30m
country: Greece
Two women retreat to a lake house to get a break from the pressures of the outside world, only to realize how disconnected from each other they have become, allowing their suspicions to bleed into reality.


Listen Up Philip
2014 · 1h 49m
country: United States
Anger rages in Philip as he awaits the publication of his second novel. He feels pushed out of his adopted home city by the constant crowds and noise, a deteriorating relationship with his photographer girlfriend Ashley, and his own indifference to promoting the novel. When Philip's idol Ike Zimmerman offers his isolated summer home as a refuge, he finally gets the peace and quiet to focus on his favorite subject: himself.
The Sixth Year
The Sixth Year
2013 · 1h 8m
country: Unknown
The Sixth Year is an art world drama series in five episodes, which re-interprets the format of the TV series. Set in the New York art world, it stages the backstage and theatricalizes the social interactions and power games, the aspirations, passions, and everyday realities of the field. The screenplay is based on interviews with artists, curators, gallerists, collectors, and art advisors, whose opinions, anecdotes, and gossip it abstracts and extrapolates into a fictional narrative.


The Color Wheel
2012 · 1h 23m
country: United States
JR, an aspiring news-anchor, forces her younger brother Colin to embark on a road trip to move her belongings out of her professor-turned-lover’s place. Traveling through New England, they uncomfortably run into old school-mates or revisit familial history from which they have long since diverged.


Impolex
2009 · 1h 13m
country: United States
Impolex tells the story of Tyrone S., a United States soldier in Operation Paperclip, the mission to locate and retrieve German rockets and rocket science after the end of World War II. Tyrone is tasked with finding what he believes are the last V-2’s. Lost in the woods of an undefined European country, people from Tyrone’s past begin to appear in unusual ways, bearing strange tidings. A loved one he abandoned for the war is especially prominent in Tyrone’s journey, as is a fellow soldier and a mysterious man with tidings of the present and the future that are not yet known to Tyrone.