Italian neorealism — the rubble and the real
Post-war Italy, 1943-1955. Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti shot in bombed streets with non-actors and natural light. Rome, Open City (1945) defined the movement. Bicycle Thieves (1948) is the blueprint every social-realist film since has copied. Umberto D. (1952) made Vittorio De Sica cry on set. Visconti's Ossessione (1943) predated it all. These films invented modern cinema's moral seriousness — Truffaut, Satyajit Ray, the Dardennes all pointed back here.
Le Trou
Bicycle Thieves
Big Deal on Madonna Street
The Wages of Fear
La Dolce Vita
Nights of Cabiria
La Strada
Umberto D.
La Terra Trema
I Vitelloni
Germany, Year Zero
Purple Noon
Paisan
Obsession
The Earrings of Madame de...
L'Avventura
Il Grido
Mon Oncle
Black Sunday
Othello
Europa '51
Miracle in Milan
Journey to Italy
The Return of Don Camillo
French Cancan
Senso
The Flowers of St. Francis
Stromboli
The Golden Coach
The Barefoot Contessa
Altre collezioni canone
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
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