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 Lerman. Slow, often political, sometimes very funny.
The Secret in Their Eyes
foreign gemcultdevastating
Wild Tales
foreign gemdevastatingdread
Argentina 1985
foreign gemslow burndevastating
Nine Queens
mindfuckweirdforeign gem
Heroic Losers
foreign gemcozydread
Man Facing Southeast
foreign gemcultneon soaked
El Angel
foreign gemdevastating
The Aerial
foreign gemcultdevastating
When Evil Lurks
cozyautumnaldread
While at War
devastatingforeign gem
At the End of the Tunnel
dreadforeign gem
Truman
cozyforeign gem
Other canon collections
Japanese New Wave — the essentials
80s horror everyone has forgotten
Giallo — Italy's blood-red mystery genre
Korean cinema essentials beyond Parasite
Post-Soviet cinema — Russia & Eastern Europe after 1991
The Romanian New Wave
Essential anime that isn't Studio Ghibli
Slow cinema — the long-take canon
70s American paranoia — the post-Watergate canon
First features by directors who later mattered
Documentaries that hold up as cinema
Scandinavian noir beyond the Stieg Larsson franchises
Iranian new wave — Kiarostami, Farhadi, and the rest
British kitchen-sink and what it became
First features directed by cinematographers
German New Wave — Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, Schlöndorff
Hong Kong action — Woo, Lam, Tsui, To
Spaghetti westerns — Leone, Corbucci, Sollima, and the second tier
Mumblecore — the American indie movement nobody named
Czech New Wave — Forman, Chytilová, Menzel, before they fled
French New Wave — Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Rivette, Rohmer
Blaxploitation — Shaft, Pam Grier, and the 70s Black cinema boom
Dogme 95 — von Trier, Vinterberg, and the vow of chastity
Australian New Wave — Weir, Miller, Armstrong, Campion
African cinema — Sembène, Sissako, Mambéty, and beyond
Italian neorealism — the rubble and the real
Commedia all'italiana — Italy laughing at itself
German expressionism — shadows, angles, madness
Taiwanese New Cinema — Hou, Yang, Tsai, and the island's quiet revolution
New Queer Cinema — Haynes, Araki, Van Sant, and the 90s insurgency
Wuxia and martial arts — flying swords, hidden masters