Good films

Science Fiction

• Arrival (2016) by Denis Villeneuve - twelve extraterrestrial spacecraft appear at twelve different locations across the Earth;

• Autómata (2014) by Gabe Ibáñez - In the late 2030s, solar flares irradiate the Earth, killing over 99% of the world’s population. The survivors gather in a network of safe cities and build primitive humanoid robots, called Pilgrims, to help rebuild and operate in the harsh environment;

• Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott - is an adaptation of the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick;

• Blade Runner 2049 by Denis Villeneuve - a sequel to the 1982 film Blade Runner;

• Children of Men (2006) by Alfonso Cuarón - The film takes place in 2027, where two decades of human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse. Illegal immigrants seek sanctuary in the United Kingdom, where the last functioning government imposes oppressive immigration laws on refugees;

• Dune (1984) by David Lynch - Set in the distant future, the film chronicles the conflict between rival noble families as they battle for control of the extremely harsh desert planet Arrakis, also known as “Dune”;

• Her (2013) by Spike Jonze - a man develops a relationship with Samantha, an intelligent computer operating system personified through a female voice.

• Mr. Nobody (2009) - the life story of Nemo Nobody, a 118-year-old man who is the last mortal on Earth after the human race has achieved quasi-immortality;

• Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by Michael Radford - the film follows the life of Winston Smith in Oceania, a country run by a totalitarian government;

• Planet of the Apes - awesomely made Franchise makes you think what really separates humans from animals and animals from humans;

• Солярис / Solaris (1972) by Andrei Tarkovsky - Psychologist Kris Kelvin travels to the Solaris space station to evaluate the situation only to encounter the same mysterious phenomena as the others;

• Star Wars - Epic saga of a time far away aged well for modern audience;

• The City of Ember (2008) by Gil Kenan - In the midst of an unspecified catastrophe, an underground city is constructed to shelter a large group of survivors, with secret instructions to future generations in a small box timed to open 200 years later. This box is entrusted to the mayor of the City of Ember. Each mayor, in turn, passes the box on to his or her successor. Over time, the significance of the box is forgotten, and the succession is broken when the seventh mayor dies before revealing the importance of the box.

• The War of the Worlds (1953) by Byron Haskin - The film is a loose adaptation of novel of the same name by H. G. Wells, the first of five film adaptations. It is a modern retelling of the 1897 novel, changing the setting from Victorian Era England to 1953 southern California, while also being a commentary on the then-ongoing Cold War and the nuclear arms race. Earth is suddenly and unexpectedly invaded by Martians and American scientist Clayton Forrester searches for any weakness that can stop them;

• They Live (1988) by John Carpenter - It follows an unnamed drifter who discovers the ruling class are in fact aliens concealing their appearance and manipulating people to spend money, breed, and accept the status quo with subliminal messages in mass media;

Comedy

• Birdman (2014) by Alejandro G. Iñárritu - Riggan Thomson is a faded American actor who is famous for playing the superhero Birdman in a film trilogy in the 1990s;

• Crna macka, beli macor / Black Cat, White Cat (1998) by Emir Kusturica - Matko is a small time hustler, living by the river Danube with his 17 year old son Zare. After a failed business deal he owes money to the much more successful gangster Dadan. Dadan has a sister, Afrodita, that he desperately wants to see get married so they strike a deal: Zare is to marry her. But none of the two care much for an arranged marriage: Zare is in love with Ida, Afrodita is waiting for the man of her dreams;

• Dzień świra (2002) by Marek Koterski - about a day in the life of Adaś Miauczyński, a Polish language teacher suffering from OCD and trying to write a verse;

• Forrest Gump (1994) by Robert Zemeckis - In 1981, Forrest Gump recounts his life story to strangers who sit next to him on a bench at a bus stop in Savannah, Georgia;

• I, Tonya (2017) by Craig Gillespie - follows the life of figure skater Tonya Harding and her connection to the 1994 attack on her rival Nancy Kerrigan;

• La belle Verte / The Green Beautiful (1996) - On the Green Beautiful, a utopian planet much smaller than Earth, during the yearly planetary meeting, Mila, a rather young woman – by the reckoning of her people, at any rate – volunteers to go as a messenger to planet Earth;

• Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain / Amelie (2001) by Jean-Pierre Jeunet - story of a shy waitress, who decides to change the lives of those around her for the better, while struggling with her own isolation;

• Pirates of the Carribean

• The Big Lebowski (1998) by Ethan Cohen - In 1991, Jeffrey “the Dude” Lebowski is a middle-aged slacker who gets assaulted in his Los Angeles home by two goons hired by pornographer Jackie Treehorn, demanding money owed him by the wife of another, wealthier Jeffrey Lebowski (the eponymous “Big Lebowski”);

• The Great Dictator (1940) by Charlie Chaplin - The action starts in 1918, with the defeat of the Tomainian army. A Jewish barber saves the life of a wounded pilot, Schultz, but loses his own memory through concussion;

• Yes man (2008) by Peyton Reed - A guy challenges himself to say “yes” to everything for an entire year;

Drama

• 12 Years a Slave (2013) - an adaptation of the 1853 slave narrative memoir Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, a New York State-born free African-American man who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841 and sold into slavery. Northup worked on plantations in the state of Louisiana for 12 years before being released;

• A Man Called Ove (2015) by Hannes Holm - His attempts to hang himself are repeatedly interrupted by Iranian immigrant Parvaneh, her Swedish husband Patrick and their two children, who are moving into the house across the street;

• Beasts of no nation (2015) by Cary Joji Fukunaga - about a young boy who becomes a child soldier as his country goes through a horrific war;

• Cidade de Deus / City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002) - depicts the growth of organized crime in the Cidade de Deus suburb of Rio de Janeiro, between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s;

• Das Leben Der Anderen / The Lives of Others (2006) - about the monitoring of East Berlin residents by agents of the Stasi, the GDR’s secret police;

• Den brysomme mannen / The Bothersome Man (2006) - story is about a man suddenly finding himself in an outwardly perfect, yet essentially soulless dystopia, and his attempt to escape;

• Deutschstunde - Siggi is in prison during the post-war period. He should write an essay. He remembers that his father was supposed to ban his profession from a friend who was a painter. Siggi should help him, but he rebelled;

• Dom za vešanje (1988) by Emir Kusturica - Perhan lives with his devoted grandmother Khaditza, his lame sister Danira and his dissolute uncle Merdzan. He wants to marry a girl named Azra, but her mother won’t allow it, as Perhan is the illegitimate son of a Slovenian soldier who had an affair with Perhan’s late mother;

• Dunkirk (2017) by Christopher Nolan - Dunkirk portrays the evacuation from three perspectives: land, sea, and air. It has little dialogue, as Nolan sought instead to create suspense from cinematography and music;

• Flags of Our Fathers (2006) / Letters from Iwo Jima (2007) by Clint Eastwood - The film portrays the Battle of Iwo Jima from the perspective of the Japanese soldiers and is a companion piece to Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, which depicts the same battle from the American viewpoint;

• Into the white (2012) by Petter Næss - A group of British and German soldiers find themselves stranded in the wilderness after an aircraft battle. Finding shelter in the same cabin, they realize the only way to survive the winter is to place the rules of war aside;

• Into the Wild (2007) by Sean Penn - is an adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s 1996 non-fiction book of the same name, based on the travels of Christopher McCandless across North America and his life spent in the Alaskan wilderness in the early 1990s;

• La vita è bella / Life Is Beautiful (1997) - Italian comedy-drama film directed by and starring Roberto Benigni, who co-wrote the film with Vincenzo Cerami. Benigni plays Guido Orefice, a Jewish Italian book shop owner, who employs his fertile imagination to shield his son from the horrors of internment in a Nazi concentration camp. The film was partially inspired by the book In the End, I Beat Hitler by Rubino Romeo Salmonì and by Benigni’s father, who spent two years in a German labour camp during World War II;

• Lebanon (2009) by Samuel Maoz - The film depicts warfare as witnessed exclusively from the inside of a tank. The crew’s window to the outside world is a gunsight;

• Loving Vincent (2017) - One year after Vincent van Gogh’s suicide, postman Joseph Roulin asks his son Armand to deliver Van Gogh’s last letter to his brother, Theo.

• No Country for Old Men (2007) by Joel and Ethan Coen - The story occurs in the vicinity of the United States–Mexico border in 1980 and concerns an illegal drug deal gone awry in the Texas desert back country;

• Requiem for a Dream (2000) by Darren Aronofsky - film depicts four different forms of drug addiction, which lead to the characters’ imprisonment in a world of delusion and reckless desperation that is subsequently overtaken by reality, thus leaving them as hollow shells of their former selves;

• The Believer (2001) by Henry Bean - Daniel Balint is a former Jewish yeshiva student, brilliant but troubled, who is now a fanatically violent neo-Nazi in New York in his early twenties;

• The Danish Girl (2015) by Tom Hooper - In mid-1920s Copenhagen, portrait artist Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander)** asks her husband, popular landscape artist Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne)**, to stand in for a female model who is late to come to their flat to pose for a painting she’s working on;

• The Guilty / Den skyldige (2108) by Lina Flint - Police officer on emergency phone duty gets a call from abducted woman;

• The Intouchables (2011) - At night in Paris, Driss is driving Philippe’s Maserati at high speed. They are chased through the streets by the police, and eventually cornered. Driss claims the quadriplegic Philippe must be urgently driven to the emergency room; Philippe pretends to have a seizure and the fooled police officers escort them to the hospital;

• The Lighthouse (2019) - Two lighthouse keepers try to maintain their sanity while living on a remote and mysterious New England island in the 1890s.

• The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) by Walter Salles - The film recounts the 1952 expedition, initially by motorcycle, across South America by Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado;

• The Shawshank Redemption (1994) by Frank Darabont - the film tells the story of Andy Dufresne, a banker who is sentenced to life in Shawshank State Penitentiary for the murder of his wife and her lover, despite his claims of innocence;

• The Lobster (2015) by Yorgos Lanthimos - internationally co-produced absurdist dystopian black comedy film. In the film’s setting, single people are given 45 days to find a romantic partner or otherwise be turned into animals;

Documentaries

• Aasta täis draamat - A young woman takes on an audacious human experiment while trying to find her place in the world and struggling with the past of her family;

• Citizenfour (2014) by Laura Poitras - concerning Edward Snowden and the NSA spying scandal;

• Food Inc. (2008) by Robert Kenner - film examines corporate farming in the United States, concluding that agribusiness produces food that is unhealthy, in a way that is environmentally harmful and abusive of both animals and employees;

• JFK to 9/11 everything is a rich man’s trick (2014) by Francis Richard Conolly - This is one of the only documentaries that actually speaks on the real Secret Societies which for most are still a secret;

• Life in a Day (2011) - crowdsourced drama/documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day, July 24, 2010;

• 선전 / Propaganda (2012) by Slavko Martinov - An anti-western propaganda film about the influences of American visual and consumption culture on the rest of the world, as told from a North Korean perspective;

• The Light Bulb Conspiracy (2010) by Cosima Dannoritzer - This is the story of companies who engineered their products to fail;

• The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) - Through psychoanalysis Žižek explores “the mechanisms that shape what we believe and how we behave”;

• ואלס עם באשיר / Waltz with Bashir (2008) by Ari Folman - depicts Folman in search of his lost memories of his experience as a soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War;

Music

• Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) by Graham King & Jim Beach - One night, after a show at a pub, Freddie goes to find the band, Smile, and with help from an attractive young woman in the hallway, Mary Austin, he finds the band outside and he compliments drummer, Roger Taylor and guitarist, Brian May on their performance;

• Sound of Noise (2010) - It tells the story of a group of musicians who illegally perform music on objects in the various institutions of a city;

• Les Miserables (2012) - Set in France during the early 19th century, the film tells the story of Jean Valjean, an ex-convict who, inspired by a kindly bishop, decides to turn his life around;

• Swiss Army Man (2016) - a man who is attempting suicide after being lost on an island, when he sees a corpse wash ashore. He develops a type of friendship with the dead body and discovers that he can manipulate the cadaver like a Swiss Army knife;

Animation

• Inside Out (2015) by Pete Docter - the film is set in the mind of a young girl named Riley Andersen, where five personified emotions—Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust — try to lead her through life as her parents move from Minnesota to San Francisco, and she has to adjust to her new surroundings;

• モンスタ / Monster (1994-2001) by Naoki Urasawa - the story revolves around Kenzō Tenma, a Japanese surgeon living in Germany whose life enters turmoil after getting himself involved with Johan Liebert, one of his former patients who is revealed to be a dangerous psychopath;

• Persepolis (2007) - The story follows a young girl as she comes of age against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution;

TV Shows

• 1899 - Set in the late 19th century, the series follows a group of passengers aboard a steamship traveling from London to New York. As they make their way across the Atlantic, strange and unsettling events begin to occur, and the passengers soon realize that something sinister is at play on the ship.

• Black Mirror by Charlie Brooker - unrelated futures play out in most disturbing fashions;

• Lost (TV series) - First TV Show that blew my mind with it’s complexity, style and attention to detail;

• Mr. Robot (2015) by Sam Esmail - if everything is a remix, why not make a masterpiece?;

• The Last of Us - the show is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a deadly fungus has wiped out much of humanity. The story follows Joel, a smuggler, and Ellie, a young girl who may hold the key to a cure for the deadly infection

• Westworld (2016) by Jonathan Nolan - In a far away future only adventure is creating artificial Wild West populated with experimental AI;

To See

El Silencio de otros,