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 Kim Jee-woon, the body horror of Park Hoon-jung.
Break the Silence: The Movie
My First Client
Sprout
Bride in Sneakers
Squid Game: Making Season 2
Burn the Stage: The Movie
Pawn
A Melody to Remember
Bring the Soul: The Movie
BTS World Tour: Love Yourself in Seoul
Inseparable Bros
BLACKPINK: Light Up the Sky
Be With You
The Handmaiden
foreign gemmindfucksexy
Silenced
20th Century Girl
Swing Kids
Everyone Is There
Remember You
Birthday
Memories of Murder
foreign gemdreadraw
1987: When the Day Comes
Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds
A Taxi Driver
The Way Home
My Annoying Brother
Keys to the Heart
Cheer Up, Mr. Lee
Castaway on the Moon
The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion
Other canon collections
Japanese New Wave — the essentials
80s horror everyone has forgotten
Giallo — Italy's blood-red mystery genre
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
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