Post-Soviet cinema — Russia & Eastern Europe after 1991
Tarkovsky and Klimov are pre-1991. After that, an unsettled cinema: Zvyagintsev's cold landscapes, Sokurov's long takes, Loznitsa's documentaries that look like funerals.
Flow
Tangerines
Sniper: The White Raven
The Old Man and the Sea
U Are the Universe
Mira
Balkan Line
Leviathan
Loveless
The Return
Russian Ark
T-34
Mavka: The Forest Song
Salyut-7
The Barber of Siberia
Flight Crew
Invasion
Three Seconds
Upon the Magic Roads
Cargo 200
The Master and Margarita
Metro
Attraction
Major Grom: Plague Doctor
Mother and Son
Atlantis
Hard to Be a God
The Blackout
Major Grom
Coma
Autres collections canon
Japanese New Wave — the essentials
80s horror everyone has forgotten
Giallo — Italy's blood-red mystery genre
Korean cinema essentials beyond Parasite
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