Film · 2011 · Persian
A Separation
Asghar Farhadi · Iran
A domestic dispute expands, almost invisibly, into a moral labyrinth. Farhadi gives every person a defensible truth, then makes those truths impossible to hold at once.
The catalogue · 48 recommendations
Something great to watch.
Films and TV series worth making time for. Browse the current recommendations, or let the archive choose one for you.
Film · 2022 · English
Aftersun
Charlotte Wells · United Kingdom
A holiday remembered in bright fragments and troubling gaps. Wells trusts small gestures, cheap video and the ache of hindsight to show how slowly a child comes to understand a parent.
Film · 2016 · English
Arrival
Denis Villeneuve · United States
A first-contact film where the decisive tool is grammar, not firepower. Its ideas about language and time land because they are finally inseparable from grief, choice and love.
TV series · 2016 · English
Atlanta
Donald Glover · United States
It treats television form as a permission slip, moving from deadpan comedy to folklore to nightmare without losing its social precision. Few series have made the familiar feel this uncanny.
TV series · 2005 · English
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Michael Dante DiMartino · Bryan Konietzko · United States
A children’s adventure with the moral architecture of a great epic. Its humour, elemental action and patient character growth make mercy feel more demanding than conquest.
TV series · 2014 · English
BoJack Horseman
Raphael Bob-Waksberg · United States
A Hollywood animal comedy that became one of television’s sharpest studies of depression, accountability and the stories people use to excuse themselves. The wordplay helps the medicine go down.
Film · 2018 · Korean
Burning
Lee Chang-dong · South Korea
A mystery built from class resentment, loneliness and the danger of not knowing. Its deliberate pace leaves room for every glance and omission to become evidence—or projection.
TV series · 2019 · English
Chernobyl
Craig Mazin · United States · United Kingdom
A procedural about catastrophe in which every lie creates a physical debt. Its horror comes less from spectacle than from watching institutions punish the people who name reality.
Film · 2006 · English
Children of Men
Alfonso Cuarón · United Kingdom · United States
A dystopia whose background details are as persuasive as its plot. Cuarón’s long takes turn political collapse into lived space, while a fragile new life makes hope feel costly rather than easy.
Film · 2002 · Portuguese
City of God
Fernando Meirelles · Kátia Lund · Brazil
Its velocity is exhilarating, but never innocent. The film turns a neighbourhood’s interlocking lives into a history of power, chance and the terrible speed with which children inherit violence.
Film · 2015 · Marathi · Gujarati · Hindi
Court
Chaitanya Tamhane · India
A courtroom film that watches the system rather than staging heroic speeches. Its patient distance reveals how bureaucracy, caste and private prejudice reproduce injustice almost casually.
TV series · 2017 · German
Dark
Baran bo Odar · Jantje Friese · Germany
An intricate time-travel puzzle that never forgets the sorrow inside its machinery. The pleasure of solving it is matched by the dread of watching families repeat what they cannot understand.
Film · 1989 · English
Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee · United States
Lee makes a neighbourhood feel exuberantly alive before showing how heat, pride and unequal power can fracture it. The film refuses the comfort of a single correct response.
Film · 2018 · Malayalam
Ee.Ma.Yau.
Lijo Jose Pellissery · India
A funeral comedy staged with the momentum of a gathering storm. Its crowded rooms and communal rituals turn grief, vanity, faith and farce into one astonishingly controlled night.
TV series · 2016 · English
Fleabag
Phoebe Waller-Bridge · United Kingdom
A formally mischievous comedy that earns every one of its sudden emotional turns. It understands the private bargain between a performer and an audience—and what happens when that bargain breaks.
TV series · 2020 · English
I May Destroy You
Michaela Coel · United Kingdom
Coel refuses a clean line from trauma to recovery. Formally playful and emotionally exact, the series makes room for contradiction without letting anyone—including its heroine—hide inside it.
Film · 2000 · Cantonese
In the Mood for Love
Wong Kar-wai · Hong Kong
Few films understand that restraint can be more charged than confession. Every corridor, dress and unfinished sentence turns passing time into something almost physical.
Film · 2019 · Malayalam
Kumbalangi Nights
Madhu C. Narayanan · India
A warm, sharply observed reinvention of the family drama. It dismantles macho posturing with humour and patience, while making its backwater village feel vividly alive.
Film · 2015 · Hindi
Masaan
Neeraj Ghaywan · India
Its intersecting lives are bound by the weight of caste and the possibility of movement. Ghaywan finds hope without pretending that love alone can dissolve the structures closing in.
Film · 2003 · Korean
Memories of Murder
Bong Joon Ho · South Korea
A police procedural that corrodes the confidence procedures are meant to provide. Bong moves between slapstick, fury and dread until the unsolved case seems to stare back at the audience.
Film · 2016 · English
Moonlight
Barry Jenkins · United States
Jenkins gives tenderness the scale of an epic. Colour, music and three remarkable performances build a life from moments when language fails but recognition remains possible.
TV series · 2018 · Italian · Neapolitan
My Brilliant Friend
Saverio Costanzo · Italy · United States
An intimate friendship rendered with the scope of social history. The series tracks admiration, rivalry and class mobility without reducing either woman to a lesson for the other.
TV series · 2022 · Korean · Japanese · English
Pachinko
Soo Hugh · South Korea · United States
A family saga told with unusual fluency across time, language and place. Its scale is immense, but the history always lands in individual bodies, bargains and memories.
Film · 2019 · Korean
Parasite
Bong Joon Ho · South Korea
A clockwork social comedy that keeps changing shape without losing its nerve. Bong turns architecture, appetite and embarrassment into a thriller about the invisible lines class draws through everyday life.
Film · 1955 · Bengali
Pather Panchali
Satyajit Ray · India
Ray’s first film made the intimate scale of childhood feel epic. Its rain, trains and restless horizons opened a path for Indian cinema that filmmakers everywhere still follow.
Film · 1966 · Swedish
Persona
Ingmar Bergman · Sweden
Bergman treats the face as both confession and mask. Compact, unsettling and formally fearless, it keeps asking whether intimacy reveals a self or invents another one.
Film · 2019 · French
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Céline Sciamma · France
Sciamma turns looking into an act of creation, desire and memory. The romance burns slowly because the film understands that attention itself can be the most intimate thing one person gives another.
Film · 2022 · Telugu
RRR
S. S. Rajamouli · India
Rajamouli treats sincerity as a special effect. Its impossible action, musical bravado and full-throated friendship show what maximalist popular cinema can do when every excess serves emotion.
Film · 2016 · Marathi
Sairat
Nagraj Manjule · India
Manjule lets first love expand into music, swagger and possibility before social reality closes the distance. Its tonal break is not a trick; it is the argument.
Film · 1954 · Japanese
Seven Samurai
Akira Kurosawa · Japan
Kurosawa makes strategy, weather and collective labour as thrilling as combat. Its influence is enormous, yet the film still feels alive because every victory carries a human cost.
TV series · 2022 · English
Severance
Dan Erickson · United States
A pristine workplace nightmare built around a devastating question: what do we owe the self who suffers so another version of us can go home? Its visual control makes every rebellion feel enormous.
Film · 2012 · English · Hindi · Arabic
Ship of Theseus
Anand Gandhi · India
A philosophical film that never mistakes abstraction for distance. Gandhi grounds large questions about identity and moral action in bodies that are vulnerable, stubborn and changing.
Film · 2001 · Japanese
Spirited Away
Hayao Miyazaki · Japan
Miyazaki makes growing up strange, frightening and exhilarating without sanding down any of childhood’s mystery. It is both a grand adventure and a precise lesson in paying attention.
Film · 1979 · Russian
Stalker
Andrei Tarkovsky · Soviet Union
A science-fiction pilgrimage stripped of spectacle and filled with dangerous ideas. Its ruined landscapes make faith, desire and disappointment feel like physical places one must cross.
TV series · 2021 · English
Station Eleven
Patrick Somerville · United States
A post-collapse story interested less in survivalism than in the stubborn human need to perform, remember and reconnect. Its audacious structure makes coincidence feel like grace.
TV series · 2018 · English
Succession
Jesse Armstrong · United States
Shakespearean stakes conducted in the language of insults, term sheets and wounded children. It understands that obscene wealth can buy anything except the approval everyone in the room still wants.
Film · 2019 · Tamil
Super Deluxe
Thiagarajan Kumararaja · India
A profane, tender cosmic comedy that keeps widening the frame around its characters. Its tonal leaps work because curiosity—not judgment—is the force connecting every strange turn.
TV series · 2022 · English
The Bear
Christopher Storer · United States
A workplace show with the pulse of an anxiety attack and the patience to see competence as care. Its kitchens reveal how grief moves through teams, rituals and the food people make together.
Film · 1972 · English
The Godfather
Francis Ford Coppola · United States
Its grandeur can obscure how intimate the tragedy is: a son becoming the very man he hoped to escape. Every shadow, promise and family ritual tightens the trap with almost ceremonial precision.
Film · 2021 · Malayalam
The Great Indian Kitchen
Jeo Baby · India
Repetition becomes the film’s sharpest weapon: dirty plates, leaking pipes and meals that erase the person making them. Its anger grows from the exactness of what everyone else calls ordinary.
Film · 2016 · Korean · Japanese
The Handmaiden
Park Chan-wook · South Korea
Park’s clockwork deception is sensuous, funny and ferociously controlled. Each retelling returns power to a different pair of hands until the con itself becomes a route to freedom.
TV series · 2014 · English
The Leftovers
Damon Lindelof · Tom Perrotta · United States
A mystery series brave enough to care more about grief than answers. It moves from despair to ecstatic strangeness while treating belief as both survival tool and dangerous invention.
Film · 2013 · Hindi
The Lunchbox
Ritesh Batra · India
A mistaken lunch delivery becomes a correspondence between two lonely strangers. Tender without being sentimental, it finds whole lives in glances, handwriting, and the food we make for other people.
TV series · 1999 · English
The Sopranos
David Chase · United States
The gangster epic becomes a domestic comedy, a therapy drama and a study of appetites that cannot be satisfied. Modern television still lives in the space it opened.
Film · 2013 · Japanese
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
Isao Takahata · Japan
Its charcoal and watercolour lines can be delicate one moment and violently alive the next. Takahata turns an old folktale into a piercing argument for the mess and freedom of earthly life.
TV series · 2002 · English
The Wire
David Simon · United States
A city novel disguised as a crime series. Each season widens the system until good intentions, incentives and survival become impossible to separate.
Film · 2015 · Kannada
Thithi
Raam Reddy · India
A village comedy populated with non-professional performers and an extraordinary sense of lived rhythm. Death starts the story, but appetite, land and mischief keep it gloriously unruly.
Film · 1953 · Japanese
Tokyo Story
Yasujirō Ozu · Japan
Ozu observes family disappointment without villains or melodrama. Its low camera and quiet rooms make ordinary neglect devastating, then find grace in the person who owes the least.