Films
Read about the filmsFind a film by title, director, mood or the time you have.
A carefully planned murder leaves behind one impossible problem: the body will not stay where it belongs.
A woman returns to postwar Japan and tries to revive a wartime affair with a man whose promises repeatedly dissolve into avoidance.
Four thieves prepare a silent heist whose precision cannot protect what follows.
A prisoner prepares an escape one sound, tool, and repeated gesture at a time.
Women working in a Tokyo brothel try to secure a future while money, family and changing public attitudes restrict their choices. Mizoguchi keeps several lives in view rather than offering one representative victim.
Kurosawa relocates Macbeth to feudal Japan, where a warrior’s rise is inseparable from ambition and betrayal. Fog, landscape and Noh-derived performance give the familiar tragedy a different dramatic language.
Two sisters face a family past that refuses to stay separate from their adult lives. Marital conflict and an unwanted pregnancy give Ozu’s domestic world an unusually harsh emotional register.
A general escorts a defeated clan’s princess and treasure through enemy territory, accompanied by two unreliable peasants. The mission has a clear goal and a persistently awkward human complication.
A restless married woman finds a new attraction that unsettles both her domestic life and an existing affair.
A brief affair in Hiroshima opens a difficult passage between public catastrophe and private memory.
A solitary young man treats theft as proof that ordinary rules do not apply to him.
A surgeon hides his injured daughter while pursuing a series of experiments intended to restore her face.
A woman disappears from a rocky island, and the search slowly exposes a different kind of absence.
Rome, glamour, emptiness — beautiful and exhausting.
A mother and her five sons move from southern Italy to Milan, where work, boxing, ambition, and desire pull the family into competing futures.
A young executive pursues the person responsible for his father’s death. Kurosawa carries the revenge story into the offices and hierarchies of postwar corporate Japan.
A family’s island life depends on the repeated labour of bringing water across the sea.
In a vast hotel, a man insists that a woman promised to leave with him last year—or perhaps in another version of the past.
Ninety anxious minutes in Paris, measured by mirrors, streets, and attention.
Two friends love the same mercurial woman across years of art, war, marriage, travel, and changing agreements.
A scruffy, experienced samurai helps a group of idealistic young warriors confront corruption within their clan. His methods make their ideas of proper conduct look dangerously naive.
A man is arrested without being detained and drawn through a legal system that never states the charge against him.
A director unable to make his next film retreats into memories, fantasies, and an ever-growing production circus.
A man leaving treatment spends a day revisiting Paris, old friends, and the life he cannot persuade himself to re-enter.
A rural woman negotiates decades of upheaval, exploitation and opportunity in twentieth-century Japan.
Two women survive a civil war by ambushing lost soldiers in tall reeds until desire unsettles their arrangement.
A yakuza released from prison meets a reckless gambler, and their search for excitement draws them towards danger.
A married literary scholar begins an affair, and a romance gradually takes on the pressure of a suspense story.
An amateur entomologist is trapped in a sand pit with a widow whose nightly labour keeps their home from being buried.
Falstaff’s warmth, vanity, and appetite fill the space between a prince’s youth and a king’s responsibilities.
An ambitious young doctor joins a clinic serving poor patients and clashes with its formidable director. His education becomes a test of what medical skill is actually for.
A donkey passes from owner to owner, carrying the weight of human tenderness, use, and cruelty.
A hit man caught between rival gangs must negotiate a crime world that increasingly closes around him.
An assassin botches a job and becomes a target in a crime story driven by strange obsessions and abrupt turns.
A condemned man survives his execution, and the authorities struggle to make their punishment proceed.
Love, rivalry, performance, and filmmaking overlap within Tokyo’s late-1960s gay counterculture.
An angel listening to Berlin’s private thoughts begins to long for weight, colour, touch, and one mortal life.
A timid accountant travels west, becomes an outlaw by accident, and drifts toward a death he barely understands.
A travelling whale and a mysterious speaker arrive in a cold town already close to collective rupture.
A series of cruel incidents disturbs a German village where discipline already governs family, school, church, and work.
A father, a daughter, and a horse repeat the work of survival as wind and light begin to withdraw from their world.
A young novice meets her aunt and learns that the life awaiting her rests beside a family history she never knew.
Two musicians repeatedly find and lose one another as borders, politics, and temperament change the terms of their love.
Still deciding? Ask Momo.
Read a film closely
Character companions, film comparisons and a closer look at particular scenes.
- Seven Samurai
Who are the seven samurai?
Names, actors and roles to keep the seven apart.
- The Wages of Fear
The original, Sorcerer, or the remake?
Three films compared before you choose.
- Breathless
What disappears in a jump cut?
A diagram of the time Godard leaves out.
- Wild Strawberries
What do the dreams mean?
Trace the clocks, mirror and final scene.
After watching · Spoilers - Persona
Why hear the same speech twice?
Follow who speaks and whose face fills the frame.
After watching · Spoilers - Bicycle Thieves
What happens at the end?
The final encounter, seen through father and son.
After watching · Spoilers