Canon collections
Ten themed lists for visitors who already know the obvious entries to a genre or movement. Each list pulls from the catalog with hand-tuned filters and an editorial intro.
Japanese New Wave — the essentials
The 1960s-70s wave that broke from the studio system. Imamura, Oshima, Yoshida, Suzuki, Wakamatsu — political, formally restless, often shot in colours that...
80s horror everyone has forgotten
The decade is famous for slashers and Carpenter / Cronenberg / Argento. These are the films from the same period that didn't quite stick — body horror...
Giallo — Italy's blood-red mystery genre
Argento and Bava are the entry points. The rest of the catalogue runs deep: pulpier, sleazier, sometimes more inventive. Black gloves, neon kills, score by...
Korean cinema essentials beyond Parasite
Bong, Park Chan-wook, Lee Chang-dong are the obvious names. South Korean cinema is deeper than the three — the slow burn of Hong Sang-soo, the chillers of...
Post-Soviet cinema — Russia & Eastern Europe after 1991
Tarkovsky and Klimov are pre-1991. After that, an unsettled cinema: Zvyagintsev's cold landscapes, Sokurov's long takes, Loznitsa's documentaries that look...
Essential anime that isn't Studio Ghibli
If you've already seen Spirited Away three times, the form goes much deeper. Satoshi Kon, Mamoru Oshii, Hideaki Anno, Katsuhiro Otomo, Mamoru Hosoda, Makoto...
Slow cinema — the long-take canon
Long takes, minimal cuts, contemplation as method. Tarr, Akerman, Costa, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, Reygadas. If you can sit through a single shot...
70s American paranoia — the post-Watergate canon
Surveillance, conspiracy, distrust of every institution. Pakula's trilogy, Coppola's wiretaps, Polanski's noir, the cop dramas where the cops are the...
First features by directors who later mattered
The film a director made before they were famous — usually rougher, sometimes more daring, almost always more revealing of what they actually cared about...
Documentaries that hold up as cinema
Not the news-magazine kind. Documentaries that work as films — paced, composed, willing to use silence. Wiseman, Herzog, Marker, Varda, Lanzmann, Morris,...
Scandinavian noir beyond the Stieg Larsson franchises
The dread-soaked Nordic landscape that became its own genre. Cold, slow, formally precise. Refn before Hollywood, late Vinterberg, Ulrich Seidl across the...
Iranian new wave — Kiarostami, Farhadi, and the rest
Children, cars, doors, the conditional. The cinema that taught the rest of the world what minimalism could carry. Kiarostami, Farhadi, Panahi, Makhmalbaf,...
Argentine cinema — beyond Wild Tales
A national cinema with more depth than its arthouse exports suggest. Lucrecia Martel's Salta trilogy, Pablo Trapero, Lisandro Alonso, Damián Szifron, Diego...
British kitchen-sink and what it became
The 60s realist movement (Reisz, Anderson, Richardson) and its descendants — Loach, Leigh, Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, the early Shane Meadows....
First features directed by cinematographers
Films where the DP took the chair and made something with an eye that already knew the medium. Roger Deakins-school graduates, Christopher Doyle in front of...
German New Wave — Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, Schlöndorff
The New German Cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s was a collective refusal. Fassbinder made melodramas that felt like autopsies — Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,...
Hong Kong action — Woo, Lam, Tsui, To
The Hong Kong action cinema of the late 1980s and 1990s is one of the most formally inventive genre bodies in film history. John Woo's ballistic ballets —...
Spaghetti westerns — Leone, Corbucci, Sollima, and the second tier
Leone defined the form: the trilogy with Eastwood, then Once Upon a Time in the West, then the gangster elegy of Once Upon a Time in America. But Sergio...
Mumblecore — the American indie movement nobody named
The label arrived after the films did. Low budgets, naturalistic dialogue, intimate crises between people in their twenties, largely in American cities....
Czech New Wave — Forman, Chytilová, Menzel, before they fled
The Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s lasted until the tanks arrived in 1968. In that window: Miloš Forman's sharp comedies of small humiliations (Loves of...
French New Wave — Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Rivette, Rohmer
The movement that broke everything open. Godard made Breathless in 1960 with a handheld camera and jump cuts nobody had tried in narrative film. Truffaut...
Blaxploitation — Shaft, Pam Grier, and the 70s Black cinema boom
A genre born from the collision of 70s exploitation budgets and Black cultural assertion. Shaft (1971) and Super Fly (1972) opened the floodgates. Pam Grier...
Dogme 95 — von Trier, Vinterberg, and the vow of chastity
In 1995 Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg wrote a manifesto: no artificial lighting, no props brought to location, no genre films, handheld camera only,...
Australian New Wave — Weir, Miller, Armstrong, Campion
The Australian film revival of the 1970s and 1980s produced some of the most visually distinctive cinema of the era. Peter Weir made Picnic at Hanging Rock...
African cinema — Sembène, Sissako, Mambéty, and beyond
The most overlooked continental cinema in the Western canon. Ousmane Sembène (Senegal) is the founding figure — Black Girl (1966), Xala, Moolaadé. Djibril...
Italian neorealism — the rubble and the real
Post-war Italy, 1943-1955. Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti shot in bombed streets with non-actors and natural light. Rome, Open City (1945) defined the...
Commedia all'italiana — Italy laughing at itself
The Italian comedy tradition from the late 1950s through the 1980s. Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) is the template — a heist film where...
German expressionism — shadows, angles, madness
Weimar Republic, 1919-1933. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) painted shadows on the set walls. Nosferatu (1922) shot without permission from Bram Stoker's...
Taiwanese New Cinema — Hou, Yang, Tsai, and the island's quiet revolution
From the early 1980s, a handful of Taiwanese directors made some of the most formally accomplished films in world cinema. Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of...
New Queer Cinema — Haynes, Araki, Van Sant, and the 90s insurgency
B. Ruby Rich named it in 1992. Todd Haynes made Poison (1991) for nothing. Gregg Araki made The Living End (1992) about two HIV-positive men on a crime...
Wuxia and martial arts — flying swords, hidden masters
From King Hu's A Touch of Zen (1971) — the film that proved martial arts belonged at Cannes — through the Shaw Brothers factory, the golden age of Jackie...