Czech New Wave — Forman, Chytilová, Menzel, before they fled
The Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s lasted until the tanks arrived in 1968. In that window: Miloš Forman's sharp comedies of small humiliations (Loves of a Blonde, The Firemen's Ball), Věra Chytilová's formally radical Daisies, Jiří Menzel's gentle Closely Watched Trains — based on Hrabal, as much of the best Czech writing is. Jan Němec, Evald Schorm, Vojtěch Jasný. After 1968, some stayed and made cautious work under normalisation; others emigrated. The list filters Czech-language films from the decade of the wave.
Man and Technology
Marketa Lazarová
The Flat
Daisies
Closely Watched Trains
The Garden
The Ossuary
The Firemen's Ball
Loves of a Blonde
Don Juan
The Last Trick
Ikarie XB 1
Leonardo's Diary
Punch and Judy
Otras colecciones canon
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
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