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 estate. Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) built a city that Blade Runner would rebuild fifty years later. M (1931) gave Peter Lorre the role of a lifetime. F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924) told a story with no intertitles. G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929) made Louise Brooks an icon. Then the Nazis came and most of these directors fled to Hollywood.
Metropolis
foreign gemdreadepic
M
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Faust
The Last Laugh
Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler
Nosferatu
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
The Adventures of Prince Achmed
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City
Pandora's Box
Spies
The Blue Angel
Vampyr
Woman in the Moon
People on Sunday
Mädchen in Uniform
Altre collezioni canone
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
Argentine cinema — beyond Wild Tales
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
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