Taiwanese New Cinema — Hou, Yang, Tsai, and the island's quiet revolution
From the early 1980s, a handful of Taiwanese directors made some of the most formally accomplished films in world cinema. Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness (1989) broke the silence on the 228 Incident. Edward Yang's Yi Yi (2000) is a four-hour family epic that Roger Ebert called one of the greatest films ever made. Tsai Ming-liang stripped cinema to its bones — water, loneliness, Taipei apartments. Ang Lee started here before Hollywood. These films move slowly and hit hard.
A Brighter Summer Day
foreign gembittersweetgut punch
Yi Yi
foreign gembittersweetslow burn
Eat Drink Man Woman
foreign gembittersweetcozy
A Touch of Zen
foreign gemepicslow burn
A City of Sadness
foreign gemslow burn
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
foreign gembittersweetepic
Taipei Story
foreign gembittersweetoutsider
Our Times
foreign gembittersweetcozy
Red Cliff II
foreign gembittersweetepic
Lust, Caution
foreign gembittersweetsexy
The Time to Live and the Time to Die
foreign gembittersweetslow burn
Vive L'Amour
foreign gembittersweetoutsider
The Wedding Banquet
foreign gembittersweetoutsider
Red Cliff
cerebralepic
The Hole
dreadslow burnsurreal
Millennium Mambo
bittersweetslow burntender
Three Times
bittersweetslow burntender
Reign of Assassins
bittersweetslow burn
The Soul
paranoidslow burn
Flowers of Shanghai
bittersweetneon soakedslow burn
The Sadness
body horrordreadraw
Goodbye, Dragon Inn
bittersweetoutsiderslow burn
The River
outsiderslow burntender
The Puppetmaster
slow burntender
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
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
New Queer Cinema — Haynes, Araki, Van Sant, and the 90s insurgency
Wuxia and martial arts — flying swords, hidden masters