One of the most important works of Mexican cinema to emerge at the turn of the century, this is still Inarritu’s finest achievement as separate narrative threads collide (literally), sparking a thought-provoking treatise on life, love and loss.
Antonioni’s first English-language film sees him in peak form, delivering a countercultural classic that is a masterclass in exploring the art and enigma of seeing, creating and deconstructing images.
Antonioni plays with colour and sound design, creating a hypnotic take on the perils of human alienation amid technological progress.
Mankiewicz’s enduring classic about the glamour of showbiz, warts and all, marked by loyal friendships and diabolical schemes, remains one of the wittiest and spriteliest of Classical Hollywood dramas.
Visually stunning that is reminiscent of Kurosawa and Tarkovsky, this Kazakh New Wave film treats the theme of vengeance as a long-gestating circle of life and death, efficiently and poetically told in a series of chapters.
A small-town priest must contend with the silence of God as he is overwhelmed with existential doubts in one of Bergman’s sparest works about the limits of religious faith.
A milestone in European art cinema, and an intentionally futile exercise in finding meaning in our seemingly meaningless existence.
Black sardonic humour abounds in this tale about the farce of capital punishment when a man is forced to marry an executioner’s daughter and has to become one himself in order to keep the apartment allotted by the state.
Kieslowski’s often overlooked middle installment of the famed trilogy may be one of his most mischievous if perverse films as a downtrodden, recently divorced Polish man plans an elaborate revenge plot against his French ex-wife.
Light-hearted and mildly amusing, Ozu’s most accessible late-career work explores the generation gap and quirks of communal communication amid a rise in consumerism in a modernising Japan.
