French New Wave — Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Rivette, Rohmer
The movement that broke everything open. Godard made Breathless in 1960 with a handheld camera and jump cuts nobody had tried in narrative film. Truffaut turned autobiography into The 400 Blows. Varda was there before both of them — Cléo from 5 to 7 is as formally adventurous as anything Godard did, with more heart. Rivette, Rohmer, Resnais, Chabrol, Demy, Marker. The catalogue runs from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s, but the ripples never stopped. The list filters French-language films from the core era, scored 6.5 or above.
Le Trou
The 400 Blows
Army of Shadows
Le Samouraï
Z
Day for Night
Crooks in Clover
Vivre Sa Vie
PlayTime
The Young Girls of Rochefort
My Night at Maud's
Cléo from 5 to 7
Fantastic Planet
Purple Noon
Jules and Jim
The Old Gun
Au Hasard Balthazar
Breathless
Band of Outsiders
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
The Phantom of Liberty
Last Year at Marienbad
Mon Oncle
Mouchette
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Happiness
F for Fake
The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob
Pierrot le Fou
Oscar
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
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
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