The repertory
The films
275 films, each read for what it does to you. Not sure where to begin? Describe a feeling.
The 1920s
The 1940s
- A poor father finally lands a job, then has the bicycle it depends on stolen, and spends a day searching the streets of Rome with his small son — until desperation makes him the very thing he was hunting. Bicycle Thieves
- A daughter is happy caring for her widowed father — so he pretends he'll remarry to free her, and the most loving lie in cinema quietly breaks them both. Late Spring
The 1950s
- A Resistance prisoner plans his escape with a sharpened spoon and knotted cloth — and the patience of it becomes something close to prayer. A Man Escaped
- A French woman and a Japanese man share one night, and her buried grief from another war rises until she can no longer tell his body from a dead lover's — a film about whether pain can ever cross from one person to another. Hiroshima Mon Amour
- A civil servant who has spent decades stamping papers learns he is dying, and spends what's left trying to prove a single life can still mean something. Ikiru
- Buñuel drops you into the slums of Mexico City, where abandoned children pass cruelty down like an inheritance — and the film refuses to save a single one of them. Los Olvidados
- A camera walks the quiet green ruins of the death camps and forces the past into the present tense, until the only question left is who is watching for the next time. Night and Fog
- Ordet
- A boy grows up poor in a Bengal village while small losses gather like rain — until one of them breaks the family open, in the film that taught the world Indian cinema could break your heart. Pather Panchali
- A young thief in Paris treats stealing as proof he's exceptional, in Bresson's austere, hypnotic study of a soul picking every pocket but the one that would set it free. Pickpocket
- Four people describe the same crime four incompatible ways, turning a simple question of what happened into a permanent doubt about truth itself. Rashomon
- A family torn apart by feudal cruelty spends years reaching toward a reunion that, when it finally comes, can no longer make anyone whole. Sansho the Bailiff
- Seven Samurai
- A boy in Paris is failed by every adult around him — parents, teachers, the state — and runs, at last, toward a sea that offers freedom and no answer at all. The 400 Blows
- A nobleman spends the last of everything on one more concert, choosing the beauty of music over survival as his estate crumbles into the flooding dark. The Music Room
- A knight home from the Crusades plays chess with Death for time enough to wring one meaningful act from a plague-stricken world — and to force an answer from a silent God. The Seventh Seal
- An elderly couple visits their grown children in the city and finds no room left for them — the most quietly devastating film ever made about family. Tokyo Story
- In a country torn by war, two peasants chase profit and glory and lose everything that mattered — a ghost story about greed told with unearthly beauty. Ugetsu
- An old professor drives to receive an honour and instead drives through his own life — the film where a man finally sees the coldness he cannot now undo, and reaches for grace anyway. Wild Strawberries
The 1960s
- From the first bone thrown into the air to a fetus floating over Earth, a film that leaps four million years to ask what we were, what we made, and what we might become. 2001: A Space Odyssey
- A famous director, creatively paralysed and hiding from everyone who wants something from him, escapes into memory and fantasy until his life and his unmade film become the same beautiful mess. 8½
- The life of a donkey, passed from owner to owner and cruelty to cruelty, becomes the most piercing film ever made about innocence in an indifferent world. Au Hasard Balthazar
- A cool, immaculate bourgeois wife begins working afternoons in a Paris brothel, and Buñuel refuses to tell you which parts are real — a film that keeps her interior locked and hands you the key to nothing. Belle de Jour
- A young Senegalese woman follows her French employers to the Riviera expecting a new life, and finds herself shrunk to a maid in a white apartment that slowly erases her — colonial power reduced to the scale of a kitchen. Black Girl
- A peasant flees a saint, then a bandit, then a killer across the scorched Brazilian backlands, learning that every promise of deliverance is just another owner — a myth about a people offered freedom and handed captivity each time. Black God White Devil
- A fashion photographer thinks his camera caught a murder in a London park — then enlarges the proof until it crumbles into grain, and his certainty that seeing is knowing crumbles with it. Blow-Up
- A small-time thief who styles himself after Bogart drifts through Paris with an American girl he can't read — a cool, careless love story that tore up the rulebook of how films are cut. Breathless
- A brilliant, lonely wife in a grand Calcutta house watches the world through a latticed window — until a visitor makes her feel her own confinement. Charulata
- A pop singer wanders Paris while waiting for a medical result that may be a death sentence — and learns, hour by hour, to stop being looked at and start seeing. Cléo from 5 to 7
- A marriage dies over a single day on a Mediterranean film shoot, and no one — not the husband, not the wife, not the film — can say exactly what killed it. Contempt
- A devout patriarch dreams his young daughter-in-law is the goddess Kali made flesh — and his belief slowly empties her of a self, with everyone watching and no one able to stop it. Devi
- One marriage, two bad nights, and a camera that will not look away — Cassavetes filming the exact moment intimacy fails in front of you. Faces
- Two friends love the same free-spirited woman across decades and two countries, and the film watches their beautiful arrangement bend, drift, and finally break. Jules and Jim
- A woman vanishes on a barren island, the search for her fades, and the man and friend left behind drift into each other while the film asks why no one seems to care. L'Avventura
- A gossip reporter drifts through Rome's endless nights chasing a sweetness that dissolves the moment he touches it — beauty as a trap he can't stop walking into. La Dolce Vita
- A man insists to a woman that they met and loved a year ago; she doesn't remember, or won't — and the film refuses to tell either of them, or you, what is real. Last Year at Marienbad
- A widowed mother quietly gives away her own happiness to marry off her daughter — and the film's real subject is the empty room she's left sitting in. Late Autumn
- Meghe Dhaka Tara
- A silent actress and the nurse who tends her slowly bleed into one person, in Bergman's fever-dream about whether the self can survive being truly seen by another. Persona
- A refugee brother raises his sister on the banks of a river after Partition, and every choice he makes to protect her only tightens the trap history has already set. Subarnarekha
- A silent, beautiful stranger arrives at a wealthy family's home, sleeps with each of them in turn, then leaves — and one by one their whole comfortable existence quietly comes apart. Teorema
- Dinner-party guests find they simply cannot leave the room — no locked door, no force, just the invisible cage of who they are. The Exterminating Angel
- A prince watches his own class die around him at a ball that lasts a lifetime, choosing to preside over the ending rather than fight it. The Leopard
- A family carries water up a hill, season after season, without a word — and by the end you feel every step in your own body. The Naked Island
- Inside a state hospital for the criminally insane, a camera simply watches — no narration, no comfort — until the ordinary machinery of care and cruelty becomes impossible to look away from. Titicut Follies
- A yakuza chase dissolved into pure pop-art delirium, where a white suit darkening to black tells you more than any line of dialogue. Tokyo Drifter
- In a dozen cool chapters, a young Parisian drifts into prostitution — and the camera holds her face so long, and explains so little, that looking itself becomes the subject. Vivre Sa Vie
- An amateur entomologist is trapped at the bottom of a sand pit with a woman who lives there, shoveling to survive — a hypnotic, erotic parable about whether a chosen cage is still a cage. Woman in the Dunes
The 1970s
- A gleeful young criminal is 'cured' of his violence by the state — and the film makes you wonder which is the greater horror, the boy or the treatment. A Clockwork Orange
- A wife who loves too openly for the world around her, and a husband who can't hold her without breaking her — a marriage filmed so close it feels like eavesdropping. A Woman Under the Influence
- A conquistador seizes command of a doomed jungle expedition chasing a city of gold that does not exist — and drifts into pure, ranting madness on a raft of the dead. Aguirre, the Wrath of God
- An older cleaning woman and a younger Moroccan worker fall in love, and a whole society lines up at the door to punish them for it. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
- A landlord's son takes what he wants from the woman who serves him, and a film about a single household quietly indicts an entire caste system. Ankur
- A soldier travels upriver to assassinate a renegade colonel and finds the war, and himself, dissolving into the same darkness he was sent to end. Apocalypse Now
- Two beautiful young killers drift across the great American plains while a girl narrates their murders in the flat, dreamy voice of a diary — and the horror is how ordinary she makes it sound. Badlands
- An Irish charmer claws his way up through the courts and wars of eighteenth-century Europe, and every rung he climbs is painted in candlelight so gorgeous it makes his downfall feel like fate. Barry Lyndon
- Three sisters gather around a fourth who is dying, in a house drenched red as the inside of a body — and the film asks whether people can ever truly reach one another before the end. Cries and Whispers
- Days of Heaven
- A first-time robber's amateur heist collapses into a daylong siege — and turns, hour by hour, into a public spectacle, a love story, and a referendum on who the system has no place for. Dog Day Afternoon
- A man alone in an industrial nowhere becomes a father to something that should not exist — the purest nightmare cinema has ever committed to film. Eraserhead
- A mother and daughter, once East Hampton aristocracy, share a crumbling mansion and each other — a portrait of two lives at once too full and catastrophically empty. Grey Gardens
- Coal miners and their wives face down company guns on a Kentucky picket line — a documentary filmed from inside the danger, where the camera itself was in the line of fire. Harlan County USA
- A single peasant family threshes, carries, and serves on a hill they have worked for three thousand years — and the film turns that endless labour into the most patient indictment ever filmed. Harvest: 3000 Years
- Seven schoolgirls visit a country house that turns out to be hungry — a fever-dream horror where a piano eats a girl and grief has grown teeth. Hausu
- Two lovers seal themselves off from the world and chase desire past every limit, until the only way further in is to destroy each other. In the Realm of the Senses
- Three days in the life of a widow who keeps house by an unbreakable routine — until the routine starts to crack, and one small act at the end changes everything. Jeanne Dielman
- Killer of Sheep
- A gambler and a madam build a frontier town out of dreams and opium — then watch the company men, the snow, and their own failure to reach each other quietly erase it all. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
- A whole city of singers, dreamers, and hangers-on drift toward one stage over five days, until America's love of spectacle absorbs even a gunshot into the next song. Nashville
- Network
- Herzog's vampire is not a fiend but a prisoner of his own immortality — a slow, dreaming plague-film about the unbearable ache of never being allowed to die. Nosferatu the Vampyre
- On a bright summer afternoon three schoolgirls and a teacher walk up a rock and simply vanish — and Weir refuses, forever, to tell you where they went or why. Picnic at Hanging Rock
- Four fascists lock a group of young people in a villa and catalogue their destruction, in the most unwatchable film ever made about what absolute power does to the body. Salò
- The philosophical pole. Time moves like water through stone. What you're searching for may not survive being found. Stalker
- A lonely cab driver prowls a rotting city at night, convinced he is the only clean thing left in it, and slides block by block toward the violence he mistakes for salvation. Taxi Driver
- A weak man buries his shame by joining the fascists and agreeing to murder his old teacher — and the film seduces you with such ravishing beauty that you feel your own complicity in his cowardice. The Conformist
- A surveillance expert who lives behind glass replays one recording until it accuses him — and destroys his whole life searching for a bug he'll never find. The Conversation
- A journalist trades his identity for a dead man's and drives into the desert to disappear — discovering you can leave your name behind but not yourself. The Passenger
- A small girl in Franco's Spain sees Frankenstein in a travelling cinema and goes looking for the spirit it woke in her — a film that turns a child's imagination into a whole hushed country. The Spirit of the Beehive
- Two young lovers in Dakar dream of escape to Paris, in a dazzling dream-logic landmark that quietly diagnoses the fantasy as a colonial trap. Touki Bouki
- A wealthy Senegalese businessman is struck impotent on the night of his third wedding, and his desperate hunt for a cure becomes a savage comedy about a class that sold out its own people. Xala
The 1980s
- At a wartime boarding school, a boy makes a friend he never quite tells, and loses him to the Occupation in a single glance he will carry for the rest of his life. Au Revoir les Enfants
- A clean-cut young man finds a severed ear in the grass and follows it under his sunny hometown into a world of desire and violence he can't look away from — or wash off. Blue Velvet
- A boy walks into a war and the war walks out wearing his face — the most honest film ever made about what atrocity does to a person. Come and See
- The hottest day of the summer on one Brooklyn block, where a pizzeria, a boom box, and a heat that won't break push a whole community toward a rupture no one can take back. Do the Right Thing
- A boot camp turns boys into weapons and a war lets them fire — Kubrick's cold, exact study of how a system manufactures killers and calls it training. Full Metal Jacket
- Two orphaned children try to survive the last months of a lost war, and the film tells you in its first breath that they won't — so you spend the rest of it grieving in advance. Grave of the Fireflies
- Nayakan
- A boxer who can only speak in fists destroys everyone who loves him, in the most beautiful film ever made about a man who cannot bear to be known. Raging Bull
- An aging warlord divides his kingdom among his sons and watches it all burn, in Kurosawa's vision of a heaven that has stopped listening. Ran
- A traveller's letters set to footage from Tokyo to Guinea-Bissau — an essay on memory, forgetting, and whether an image can hold a life once the moment is gone. Sans Soleil
- Three drifters travel from New York to Cleveland to Florida and arrive, each time, at exactly the same nowhere — a deadpan comedy about how motion changes nothing. Stranger Than Paradise
- In a starving mountain village, an old woman calmly prepares for the custom that will have her son carry her up the mountain to die — and the film makes that act feel loving, brutal and cosmically ordinary all at once. The Ballad of Narayama
- A man who mistakes wanting fame for deserving it kidnaps his way onto a talk show — and the most disturbing thing is that it works. The King of Comedy
- The Thin Blue Line
- It opens on a young woman frozen dead in a ditch, then reconstructs her final drifting weeks from the people who met her — and refuses, to the end, to tell you whether her freedom was liberation or self-destruction. Vagabond
- A sleaze-TV programmer chases a broadcast that rewrites the flesh of anyone who watches it — and the film becomes the thing it warns about, a screen destroying a man watched by people staring at a screen. Videodrome
- A small boy takes home a classmate's notebook by mistake and spends a whole evening trying to return it — and that tiny errand becomes one of cinema's purest portraits of conscience. Where Is the Friend's House?
- An angel over divided Berlin, who has heard every human thought for eternity, falls in love and chooses to become mortal — a film that makes cold hands and a first cup of coffee feel like miracles. Wings of Desire
- A young man flees across the deserts of Mali with a sacred power his father means to kill him for — an African myth told as living reality, where light itself is both gift and weapon. Yeelen
The 1990s
- A teenage boy in an exiled community, a flashlight in the dark, a girl he can't hold onto — and four hours of a whole generation quietly foreclosed until the violence that was always coming arrives. A Brighter Summer Day
- A mother loses her son and travels back into her own past to become, piece by piece, a family stitched together out of other people's grief. All About My Mother
- A high-minded playwright checks into a rotting Hollywood hotel to write for the common man, and slowly discovers he cannot hear the one living beside him — a nightmare about the artist who loves humanity in theory. Barton Fink
- Two strangers meet on a train, get off in Vienna, and spend one night walking and talking, knowing dawn will end it — the whole film is the space between two people learning they're real to each other. Before Sunrise
- After a crash takes her husband and child, a woman tries to erase every tie that could hurt her again — and discovers that cutting herself free of love is the one freedom she can't survive. Blue
- A hardened woman who writes letters for the illiterate at a Rio station ends up dragging an orphaned boy across Brazil to find his father — and thaws, against her will, into someone capable of love. Central Station
- Two Hong Kong love stories about people who keep reaching for each other at slightly the wrong moment — and the ache of never quite coinciding in time. Chungking Express
- A man is arrested for pretending to be a famous director — then plays himself in the film about it, until you can no longer tell where the lie ends and the longing begins. Close-Up
- Dead Man
- A tax auditor, a strip-club dancer, and a grieving man circle one another in a film where every private ritual turns out to be a way of surviving the same loss. Exotica
- Two boys trained in Peking opera grow into a lifelong, unequal love, and half a century of Chinese history walks through their lives breaking everything it touches. Farewell My Concubine
- A car salesman's small, stupid crime spirals into blood across the Minnesota snow — and the only thing standing against it is a pregnant police chief who still believes in decency. Fargo
- Two women trapped in loveless marriages inside one Delhi household reach for each other — and desire itself becomes an act of quiet rebellion against everything they were raised to obey. Fire
- A woven carpet tells the story of its own maker — a woman in love with a horseman she is never allowed to reach — until story, weaver, and colour become the same living thing. Gabbeh
- Thirty years inside the mob, told at the speed of a high — Scorsese seduces you with the good life, then makes you watch the bill come due. Goodfellas
- A master thief and the detective hunting him meet once over coffee, recognise each other completely, and destroy each other anyway. Heat
- Two Chicago teenagers chase the NBA for five years — and the film quietly reveals that the dream was always the bait in a much larger trap. Hoop Dreams
- A fabulously rich woman returns to the poor village that once cast her out and offers it a fortune — on the single condition that they kill the man who wronged her. Hyenas
- A grown man tries to recall the sunstruck summer of his adolescence — and keeps catching himself inventing it as he goes. In the Heat of the Sun
- A narcoleptic hustler loves a friend who can walk back into the life he was born to — a road movie about who is allowed a destination and who is condemned to circle. My Own Private Idaho
- A young woman becomes the fourth wife in a walled compound where lanterns decide who matters, and watches its beautiful machinery slowly grind her down. Raise the Red Lantern
- A teenage girl fights with her whole body for a job, any job, in a film that straps you to her back and never once lets you rest. Rosetta
- A squad is sent into occupied France to pull one soldier out of the war — and the question of whether one life can be worth the lives spent saving it never stops bleeding. Saving Private Ryan
- A war profiteer who came to Poland to get rich ends up spending everything he has to buy back lives, one name at a time, as an industry of murder runs at full speed around him. Schindler's List
- Two detectives chase a killer using the seven deadly sins as his design — and the closer they get, the clearer it becomes the case was built to catch them, not to be solved. Se7en
- In a rotting collective farm sinking into the rain, a ruined community waits for a charismatic con-man they mistake for a savior — a vast, patient descent into how hope becomes the thing that traps you. Sátántangó
- A man drives the dusty hills above Tehran asking strangers to help him die — and the film becomes a quiet, circling argument about whether one small taste of the ordinary world is reason enough to stay alive. Taste of Cherry
- Two sisters kept locked inside their home for their whole childhood step into the street for the first time — and the ordinary world of sunlight, ice cream and a ball becomes a paradise you had forgotten to notice. The Apple
- Two identical women who never meet sense each other across a border — a film that grieves a connection it refuses to explain, and never needs to. The Double Life of Véronique
- A mute woman lets a piano speak for her desire, and the bargain she strikes to keep it drags a marriage, an ocean, and her own will toward the point of no return. The Piano
- After a school bus goes through the ice and a town loses its children, a lawyer arrives to assign blame — and a surviving girl decides what grief is allowed to become. The Sweet Hereafter
- A battle for one Pacific island becomes Malick's hushed inquiry into why beauty and slaughter share the same world — a war film that is really a prayer. The Thin Red Line
- On the set of another film, a young laborer keeps proposing to a woman who will not so much as look at him — and the camera keeps rolling until you cannot tell the performance from the longing. Through the Olive Trees
- One ordinary family carried across four decades of Chinese history, where every hard-won calm is only the pause before the next loss the state inflicts. To Live
- Underground
- An aging killer takes one last job for money — and the film uses him to take the whole heroic Western apart, until the just killing looks exactly like the crimes it answers. Unforgiven
The 2000s
- A man's last day of freedom before prison — spent saying goodbye to his friends, his city, his dog, and the life he threw away — in a New York still raw from its own catastrophe. 25th Hour
- One woman helps her friend through an illegal abortion across a single day in Ceaușescu's Romania — and the ordinary world turns, hour by hour, into a machine of quiet terror. 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days
- An ordinary physics professor's life comes apart for no reason he can find — and every wise man he asks has nothing, absolutely nothing, to tell him. A Serious Man
- A carefree seaside weekend among old friends turns, in a single afternoon, into a moral catastrophe over a woman none of them really knew. About Elly
- One car crash, three lives, and a savage argument that in this city love and cruelty are the same animal. Amores Perros
- In a Bamako courtyard, ordinary life goes on — laundry, cooking, a marriage quietly ending — while African witnesses put the World Bank and the IMF on literal trial for the ruin of a continent. Bamako
- A comfortable Paris couple starts receiving anonymous tapes of their own front door being watched — and the mystery of who's filming becomes a reckoning with a private cruelty, and a national crime, neither wants to name. Caché
- Two decades in a Rio favela told at the speed of a bullet — children inheriting guns from children, and the one boy who might photograph his way out. City of God
- A near-blind factory worker sacrifices everything for her son's sight, escaping into musical daydreams that the real world snaps shut — until the trap closes for good. Dancer in the Dark
- A young man is sent to kill the man who murdered his father, finds him running a bakery, and takes a job at his side — carrying a pistol and kneading bread in the same small room. Daratt
- A jaded city photographer lets his unemployed country cousin stay in his flat for a winter, and the two men share the same rooms while remaining unreachably far apart. Distant
- Dogtooth
- An ordinary school morning, filmed with terrible calm, walking the same corridors again and again until it arrives at the violence it refuses to explain. Elephant
- A man who loved grizzly bears enough to live among them, and the bear that finally killed him — Herzog turns the footage into a duel over what nature means, and whether it means anything. Grizzly Man
- Two people in a hallway. A dress. A cigarette. Everything that matters is in what they don't say. In the Mood for Love
- A rich family rots in place across one humid summer, everyone lying too close to touch, waiting for a rain that never washes anything clean. La Ciénaga
- One day and night between two strangers in San Francisco — a tender walk-and-talk that turns out to be an elegy for a city quietly pricing its Black residents out. Medicine for Melancholy
- A man who can't form new memories hunts his wife's killer, guided only by tattoos and notes — a thriller running backward toward the truth he's been hiding from himself. Memento
- Two mismatched detectives chase a serial killer through rural Korea for years and never catch him — a true-crime procedure that slowly curdles into something that stares back at you. Memories of Murder
- A woman shelters a group of girls fleeing genital cutting behind a sacred cord, and one act of protection cracks a whole village's patriarchy open — political cinema that believes change is possible. Moolaadé
- A film that falls asleep as one story and wakes up as another — and the dream was the only part that was kind. Mulholland Drive
- A hunter takes a satchel of drug money and a killer with no motive comes for it, in a film that strips away every showdown the genre promises to reveal a universe that simply does not care. No Country for Old Men
- Four children are left alone in a Tokyo apartment and slowly disappear from the world's attention, in the quietest catastrophe you will ever watch. Nobody Knows
- On the day of a World Cup qualifier, a group of Iranian girls disguised as boys are caught trying to enter a stadium women are banned from — a warm, funny, furious film about an absurd line drawn through a nation's joy. Offside
- Oldboy
- No narration, no music, no comment — just the vast, silent machinery that turns living things into food, filmed so beautifully you cannot look away from what you would rather not see. Our Daily Bread
- A provincial theatre troupe drifts through a decade as China turns from Mao to the market, and their fading dreams become the whole quiet story of a country changing beneath them. Platform
- A lonely man wired too tight for the world finds love and rage arriving at once, in a romance that feels like a nervous system turned inside out. Punch-Drunk Love
- Four people chase their separate dreams through addiction and arrive, together, at the bottom — a film engineered to leave you as wrecked as they are. Requiem for a Dream
- Secret Sunshine
- A married Mennonite farmer loves another woman, confesses it, and sets in motion a quiet catastrophe that the film answers with a miracle it refuses to explain. Silent Light
- A child walks into a world that doesn't explain itself — and the film trusts you the same way. Spirited Away
- A life told in five seasons on a monastery that floats on still water, where the same sins return in new bodies and beginning again is not failure but the shape of things. Spring Summer Fall Winter and Spring
- Two people go looking for the spouses they lost in a city being demolished and drowned by a great dam, and find that home has already gone under the water. Still Life
- A family gathers for a single day to remember a son who drowned years ago, and lets slip, through small talk and cooking, all the love and resentment they will never say straight. Still Walking
- Two men keep vigil over two women lying in comas, and one of them crosses a line so quietly and so tenderly that you're implicated in your own sympathy before you understand what you've forgiven. Talk to Her
- Across one day in Tehran, the film hands off from one woman to the next, each trapped by the same invisible rules — and the story closes exactly where it began, on a door shutting. The Circle
- A man paralysed head to toe writes an entire book by blinking one eye — and the film seals you inside his skull so you feel it from the inside out. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
- An architect of mass death sits looking straight into the lens, confessing everything except the one thing that would finally condemn him. The Fog of War
- A filmmaker roams France meeting people who live off what others throw away — and, filming her own aging hands, quietly makes the discarded and the overlooked feel sublime. The Gleaners and I
- A well-off woman hits something on a country road — maybe a dog, maybe a child — and watches her family and her class quietly make it disappear. The Headless Woman
- A retired investigator reopens a decades-old murder he could never let go — and finds it braided to a love he never dared to speak. The Secret in Their Eyes
- In a German village on the eve of the First World War, small cruelties multiply and no one is ever caught — a cold, immaculate study of where the next century's violence was quietly raised. The White Ribbon
- A man digs for oil and finds out what he's actually made of — and it's worse than he thought. There Will Be Blood
- A man obsessed with becoming Saturday Night Fever's dancer kills without a flicker of feeling, in a Chile where the dictatorship has made exactly this kind of soul. Tony Manero
- A tender love story between two men breaks in half and becomes a wordless nighttime hunt through the jungle — the same longing, transformed into myth. Tropical Malady
- Volver
- A veteran realises he can remember nothing of the massacre he was near, and animates his way back into the hole in his memory — until the drawings drop away and the real footage arrives to finish the sentence. Waltz with Bashir
- In colonial India, a child is widowed and sent to live out her life in an ashram for the discarded — and the film makes the ordinary completeness of that erasure more unbearable than any single cruelty. Water
- A woman and her dog break down in a town that has no use for either of them — and you watch a life slip below the waterline, one small refusal at a time. Wendy and Lucy
- Werckmeister Harmonies
- West of the Tracks
- A grieving watch-seller in Taipei starts resetting every clock he can find to Paris time, chasing a woman he barely met — a film that turns longing itself into the substance you breathe. What Time Is It There?
- Two boys and an older woman drive to a beach that may not exist, and a road trip about sex becomes a quiet reckoning with class, mortality, and everything youth is too busy to notice. Y Tu Mamá También
- An entire family, an entire city, an entire life — compressed into three hours that feel like breathing. Yi Yi
- The hunt for a killer who is never caught stretches across two decades until the case stops being a mystery and becomes an obsession that eats the men chasing it. Zodiac
The 2010s
- A week before their forty-fifth anniversary, a letter arrives about the woman the husband loved before — and a marriage that seemed complete discovers it may never have been what she thought. 45 Years
- A quiet man refuses to pay the bribes everyone else pays — and watches his own integrity slowly destroy everyone he loves. A Man of Integrity
- A couple splitting up, a hired caregiver, an accident on a staircase — and a moral knot where everyone is right and no one can be forgiven. A Separation
- Four ordinary people across modern China, each pushed past the edge of endurance, each answering a rigged system the only way it left them — with violence. A Touch of Sin
- A retired music teacher watches the woman he has loved for a lifetime disappear inside her own body, and stays to the end of it. Amour
- One woman refuses to sell the apartment that holds her whole life, and her stubbornness becomes a country's argument about memory, class, and what money is allowed to erase. Aquarius
- When the young men of a Dakar neighbourhood drown chasing work across the sea, the ocean sends them back — as fire, as fever, as a debt the living must pay. Atlantics
- A remote Brazilian village vanishes from the map and wakes to find itself hunted for sport — a genre ambush that turns the logic of who gets erased inside out. Bacurau
- The birth of Colombia's drug trade told from inside an indigenous Wayuu family, where ancient codes of honour and omen collide with narco money — and a whole way of life dismantles itself from within. Birds of Passage
- Filmed with the same actors across twelve real years, a boy grows from six to eighteen in front of you — and the film's true subject isn't the plot but the unbearable, ordinary passing of time itself. Boyhood
- A poor young writer, the girl he wants, and the wealthy, unreadable man who takes her circle each other until she vanishes — and the film leaves you unable to prove whether a crime ever happened at all. Burning
- A documentary cinematographer assembles the offcuts of a life spent filming other people's lives — and turns a career's worth of witnessed joy and horror into a searching question about what it costs to keep watching. Cameraperson
- Three women in the cold vastness of Montana, each reaching for something they can't name — and the film's honesty is that none of them quite get it. Certain Women
- A man and a woman spend a day in Tuscany as strangers — until, halfway through, they may have been married for years, and you can no longer tell which version is the copy. Certified Copy
- A filmmaker sits in a hotel room with a man about to expose the largest surveillance apparatus in history — and the camera watches him rehearse his own disappearance in real time. Citizenfour
- Two people who can live neither together nor apart, loving each other across borders and years, in the most beautiful black and white you'll ever ache through. Cold War
- A folk singer is dragged through a court on an absurd charge, and the film watches the machinery grind on — patient, comfortable, and utterly indifferent to the man inside it. Court
- Two explorers, decades apart, travel the Amazon with the last shaman of a vanished people — a black-and-white dream about everything colonialism erased and called progress. Embrace of the Serpent
- Agnès Varda, eighty-something and losing her sight, drives across France with a young artist pasting giant portraits of ordinary people onto the walls of their disappearing world. Faces Places
- Two gentle men steal a little milk to build a life, and a country built on taking makes sure they can't keep it. First Cow
- Three generations of a coal-country blood feud — five hours of ambition, betrayal, and song where revenge is inherited like a surname. Gangs of Wasseypur
- One long, panicked New York night as a man tears through the city to save his brother — destroying everyone he touches, most of all the person he loves. Good Time
- A young woman loves a man who won't love her back, chasing the next fix and the next chance to prove it on the streets of New York — shot so close you can feel the concrete. Heaven Knows What
- Millions of people on the move with nowhere to land — filmed from the ground and the sky until a news story becomes a lived condition you carry out of the room. Human Flow
- A silent little girl is accused of witchcraft and tied by a ribbon to a machine of superstition, state, and spectacle — a deadpan fable where every exit turns out to be another cage. I Am Not a Witch
- A young novice about to take her vows learns she is Jewish and goes looking for her family's wartime grave — and finds a question no faith can close. Ida
- Two young people in love are pulled apart by a lie the whole system chooses to believe — and the film films their tenderness like it's already being taken from them. If Beale Street Could Talk
- Twins open their dead mother's will and are sent to find a father they thought was gone and a brother they never knew — and the truth they uncover rearranges everything. Incendies
- A gifted folk singer spends a freezing week failing his way around a city that will never let him in — and the film quietly reveals he's been walking in a circle the whole time. Inside Llewyn Davis
- One long day in a Paris housing estate where every cop, hustler and child is playing a defensible game — until a drone catches the one thing that can't be un-seen, and the whole street tips toward fire. Les Misérables
- A man fights the mayor who wants his house on the cliff — and learns that in this country the law, the church and the sea are all on the other side. Leviathan
- Two hours of one chase down one road — and somehow the most emotional action film ever made, where every crash is a sentence and water is the only prayer. Mad Max: Fury Road
- A nation rises in a single square, and the camera simply stands there and watches — through songs, through smoke, through funerals — until the crowd itself becomes the film's hero. Maidan
- A writer who tells the truth about Partition is dragged through court after court for obscenity — because the only obscenity, he insists, is the world he's describing. Manto
- Two lives cracked open by caste and shame beside the burning ghats of Varanasi — a film about grief that isn't allowed to speak its own name. Masaan
- A wagon party lost in the high desert follows a guide who may not know the way — a Western stripped down to thirst, distrust, and the terror of not knowing. Meek's Cutoff
- A rogue planet drifts toward Earth while a depressed woman grows calmer the closer it comes — the end of the world as the one thing that finally makes sense to her. Melancholia
- A Black boy grows into a man across three chapters of a Miami life, learning to armor a self the world won't let him show — until one late night finally lets him be seen. Moonlight
- A middle-aged man excavates the girl who defined him, and the film discovers that memory doesn't recall the past so much as rebuild it — lit gold and slightly untrue. My Golden Days
- The men who toppled a dictator did it by selling democracy like a soft drink — and the film asks whether a victory won that way is entirely a victory at all. No
- A brilliant young man commits a murder and lets an innocent stranger take the punishment — a four-hour reckoning, patient as a life sentence, with what a society does to the people it decides are disposable. Norte, the End of History
- In the driest desert on Earth, astronomers search the sky for the origin of time while women search the sand for the bones of the murdered — one film binding starlight and atrocity into a single act of remembering. Nostalgia for the Light
- Of Gods and Men
- Through one long night, a convoy of tired men drives the Anatolian steppe searching for a buried body — and the real investigation turns out to be into the things men can never bring themselves to say. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
- A poor family cons its way into a rich one, floor by floor — until the house gives up its secret and the whole staircase of class comes crashing down. Parasite
- A bus driver writes poems no one will read across seven near-identical days — and Jarmusch turns that nothing into one of cinema's gentlest arguments that a small life, fully attended, is enough. Paterson
- A farmer announces he'll kill himself for the government payout, and a whole nation's media, politics, and charity descend to profit from his death — a comedy that curdles into something unforgivable. Peepli Live
- A tyrannical couturier meets a woman who refuses to be one more of his muses — and their love becomes a duel of control so precise you feel each move before you understand it. Phantom Thread
- A Holocaust survivor with a surgically remade face returns to the husband who may have betrayed her — and he, not recognising her, hires her to impersonate his own dead wife. Phoenix
- An ageing woman takes a poetry class just as her memory begins to fail and a terrible crime touches her family — and she must decide how to hold beauty and guilt in the same failing hands. Poetry
- Two women on a remote island fall in love in the space of a few weeks, in a film that turns the act of looking into the most charged thing in cinema. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
- Roma
- A makeshift family scraping by on petty theft loves one another more truly than the blood families around them — until the law decides that what they built was never a family at all. Shoplifters
- Two Jesuit priests smuggle themselves into a Japan that tortures its Christians, and one is driven toward the question at the film's core: what does it mean when you pray and heaven stays silent? Silence
- A man moves through the machinery of a death camp carrying a corpse he calls his son, and the full horror stays just behind him, out of focus — where you can never look away because you can never quite see it. Son of Saul
- A filmmaker turns the camera on her own family to solve the mystery of her mother, then reveals that some of the home movies she's been showing you were staged all along. Stories We Tell
- One Christmas Eve on the sun-blasted edge of Hollywood, two friends tear across the city in fury and heartbreak — and the whole loud, restless day turns out to be about one small act of tenderness. Tangerine
- The men who carried out a mass killing are invited to restage their crimes as scenes from the movies they love — and the play-acting slowly becomes the one mirror they never meant to build. The Act of Killing
- A summer of childhood anarchy in a budget motel in the shadow of Disney World — joyful and kinetic, until it quietly becomes one of the most heartbreaking films about poverty ever made. The Florida Project
- A con artist plants a maid to swindle an heiress out of her fortune — and the film keeps rewinding to show you how thoroughly you were deceived alongside them. The Handmaiden
- In a world where the single are turned into animals, a lonely man goes looking for love by the rules — and finds the rules are the cruelty. The Lobster
- A man sits across a table from the men who murdered his brother and simply asks them why — and their calm is more terrifying than any confession. The Look of Silence
- A wrongly delivered lunch begins a correspondence between two lonely strangers in Mumbai — a love story told in food and letters that may never let them meet. The Lunchbox
- With no photographs left of the dead, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge sculpts his lost family out of clay — and mourns a whole world with his hands. The Missing Picture
- A single button dredged from the ocean floor becomes a letter from Chile's disappeared, in a film that strains to hear the voices the water refuses to give back. The Pearl Button
- A young rodeo rider forbidden to ride again must find out who he is when the one thing he was built for is taken — a true story played by the man who lived it. The Rider
- After an intruder violates their new apartment, a husband's hunt for revenge quietly dismantles the very marriage he thinks he's defending. The Salesman
- A boy grows up in a Texas summer while the universe is born and dies around him — one family's grief set against the whole history of creation, with no answer as to which one matters more. The Tree of Life
- Six days. Two people. One horse. And the slow extinction of everything — including the light. The Turin Horse
- A rural policeman tries to save his daughter from a sickness that might be plague, might be possession, might be nothing — a horror film that strips away your ability to trust anything you have seen. The Wailing
- Banned from making films and confined to his apartment, a director spends a day describing the film he is not allowed to shoot — an act of defiance disguised as a home video. This Is Not a Film
- Under jihadist occupation, a herder's family and a whole town try to keep living as music, laughter, and freedom are outlawed one by one — beauty and atrocity bathed in the same golden desert light. Timbuktu
- A woman has one weekend to visit her coworkers one by one and beg them to give up their bonus so she can keep her job — and the asking is the whole ordeal. Two Days One Night
- A dying man is visited by his late wife's ghost and his lost son returned as a red-eyed forest spirit, in a serene film where past lives are places you can walk into. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
- Uncut Gems
- An alien wears a woman's face through the streets of Scotland, hunting men — until inhabiting a body starts to feel like something, and the film turns the male gaze inside out. Under the Skin
- A girl in flood-country Assam wants a guitar she cannot afford, so she carries a cardboard one — and out of that small, stubborn wish the film builds a whole world of childhood held against indifferent water. Village Rockstars
- A retired actor turned landlord holds court in a snowbound Anatolian hotel, and across three hours of talk you watch a cultured man defend himself brilliantly against ever having to change. Winter Sleep
- A colonial officer waits years for a transfer that never comes, and the waiting slowly dissolves him — a portrait of a man erased by the very empire he serves. Zama
The 2020s
- A woman loses the town she belonged to and takes to the road in a van — not a story about poverty so much as an elegy for how a person builds a life after the world that held her simply ends. Nomadland
- A man gives two decades to a sacred musical tradition that will never love him back — and slowly becomes the gatekeeper he once resented. The Disciple
- Four stories about the death penalty in Iran — the men who carry it out, the men who refuse, and the cost either way — quietly asking whether an ordinary person can stay innocent inside a machine built for killing. There Is No Evil
Every film here is read the same way, for what it does rather than what it is about. How the films are read.