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 before the studio paid them to polish.
The Godfather
bittersweetepictender
Madonna: The Immaculate Collection
Castle Under Fiery Skies
12 Angry Men
cerebralparanoidpitch black
Leave it to Kero!
Sprout
City of God
foreign gembittersweetoutsider
Cinema Paradiso
foreign gembittersweetcozy
Haikyu!! the Movie: The End and the Beginning
Burn the Stage: The Movie
Stop Making Sense
WWE WrestleMania 21
Perfect Blue
foreign gemmindfuckparanoid
Tomorrow's Joe The Movie
Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion
Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion
The Lion King
bittersweetepictender
Night and Fog
The Matrix
cerebralmindfuck
The Matrix
cerebralmindfuck
Bicycle Thieves
Alien
body horrordreadslow burn
The Usual Suspects
cerebralmindfuckparanoid
Silenced
Senna
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
playful
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
bittersweetsurreal
Big Deal on Madonna Street
Das Boot
Dave Chappelle: Killin' Them Softly
Weitere Kanon-Sammlungen
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
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