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 — The Killer, Hard Boiled — set the template. Ringo Lam gave it grit and claustrophobia (City on Fire). Tsui Hark produced half the decade at breakneck pace. Johnnie To eventually made the whole thing his own in the 2000s: Election, Exiled, Mad Detective. The list surfaces Hong Kong and Chinese-language action, crime, and thriller films from 1985 onward.
A Brighter Summer Day
The Departed
paranoidraw
Ne Zha 2
The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion
Let the Bullets Fly
Ip Man
foreign gemrawuplifting
Bullet in the Head
Police Story
The Mission
Hero
Fist of Legend
Kung Fu Hustle
foreign gemcerebralplayful
Ip Man 2
The Legend of Drunken Master
Iron Monkey
Sleepless Town
Big Brother
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
foreign gembittersweetepic
Striking Rescue
Election 2
A Better Tomorrow
Operation Red Sea
The Calm Beyond
The Red Violin
Running Out of Time
Operation Condor
House of Flying Daggers
The Wandering Earth II
A World Without Thieves
New Dragon Gate Inn
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
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