The Films You Love

Sofia Coppola (“Lost in Translation”) made her debut adapting Jeffrey Eugenides’s book, with a sixteen-year-old Kirsten Dunst and music by Air. Five sisters live in 1970s suburbia, and the local boys who watch them understand nothing, though they’ll remember those girls for the rest of their lives. — The five Lisbon sisters of 1970s suburban Detroit are beautiful and dreamy, and they hardly ever leave the house. After the youngest ends up in hospital, their parents close the doors for good, and the neighbourhood boys start collecting everything the girls throw out, though none of them can make sense of what goes on inside. — Official Selection - Directors' Fortnight | Cannes Film Festival | 1999

Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot are two people who can neither live together nor leave each other alone, in a post-war Europe shot in black and white. The melodrama won Paweł Pawlikowski (“Ida”) Best Director at Cannes, earned three Oscar nominations and took the whole world by storm. — Zula and Wiktor meet among the ruins of post-war Poland and fall into a love that neither of them can escape. Over the years of the Cold War it pulls them through Poland, France, Germany and Yugoslavia, while politics, their own failings and a run of bad luck keep tearing them apart, only to bring them back together. — Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2019 Nominated for Best Achievement in Directing | Oscars | 2019 Nominated for Best Achievement in Cinematography | Oscars | 2019 Best Director | Cannes Film Festival | 2018

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone star in a much-loved modern take on the classic Hollywood musical, set in a Los Angeles where a pianist and an actress can’t get work. It’s all love and dancing, and it earned fourteen Oscar nominations and six wins. For anyone who still hasn’t given up on a dream. — A traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway breaks into dance, while Mia runs her lines in the car on the way to yet another audition. Sebastian, meanwhile, is playing Christmas carols in a restaurant that has banned him from playing jazz. Their first two meetings don’t go well, but after the third they find in each other the support neither of them expected on the way to their dreams. — Nomination for Best Film | Oscars | 2017 Best Director | Oscars | 2017 Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Emma Stone) | Oscars | 2017 Nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Ryan Gosling) | Oscars | 2017 Best Cinematography | Oscars | 2017 Best Original Score | Oscars | 2017 Best Original Song | Oscars | 2017 Best Production Design | Oscars | 2017

Bertolucci (“Stealing Beauty”) shut Eva Green, in her screen debut, Michael Pitt and Louis Garrel inside a Paris apartment for what is now a cult film. Outside it’s 1968, but they have eyes only for each other and their games of film charades, in a love triangle that’s hard to resist. — In Paris in 1968, police break up a crowd protesting the sacking of Henri Langlois from the Cinémathèque française. Among the protesters are twins Théo and Isabelle and Matthew, an American exchange student who spends every evening in its auditorium. The twins invite him to dinner with their parents and talk him into staying, and when the parents leave for a month, the three of them have the flat to themselves. — Nominated for Best Director | Golden Globes | 2004 Nominated for Best European Film | Goya Awards | 2004 Nominated for EFA People's Choice Award | European Film Awards | 2004

Stephen Rea and Forest Whitaker get one night to talk in a political thriller that is also a sensual neo-noir and a hard look at what love is. Neil Jordan (“Interview with the Vampire”) struggled to get it financed, then won an Oscar for the screenplay. And there’s a twist nobody gives away. — At a funfair somewhere in Northern Ireland, Jude chats up Jody, a British soldier, and leads him straight into the hands of an IRA unit. There are three days to secure a prisoner exchange, and Fergus is the one guarding him. By dawn the two men like each other, so Jody asks one thing in case he doesn’t make it: that Fergus find Dil in London and give her a message. — Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 1993 Nominated for Best Film | Oscars | 1993 Nominated for Best Editing | Oscars | 1993 Nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Stephen Rea) | Oscars | 1993 Nominated for Best Director | Oscars | 1993 Nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Jaye Davidson) | Oscars | 1993 Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film | BAFTA | 1993 Best European Achievement of the Year | European Film Awards | 1993

Jep Gambardella turns sixty-five on a terrace overlooking the Colosseum, where the wild partying keeps running into an existential void. Sorrentino’s most Felliniesque tribute to Rome won him the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and it’s all painful revelry and, well, great beauty. — In summertime Rome, Jep Gambardella is sixty-five and still the most wanted guest at every dinner and party in town, and the best of them are the ones he throws himself on his terrace overlooking the Colosseum. Back when he was a young journalist, he wrote one novel, which won a prize and earned him a name as an artist. He hasn’t written a word since. — Oscar Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2014

Ari Aster’s debut, before he made “Midsommar”, is one of the most frightening films of the 21st century, an ambitious labyrinth that turns out, surprisingly, to be a family story. Toni Collette’s grief runs into something demonic, and it leaves you wondering what else a family passes down. — Annie Graham builds miniatures for a living, and after burying the mother she hadn’t been able to talk to for years, she goes back to her workshop, even though something in the house has changed. Her daughter Charlie barely says a word, while her husband Steve wants life to carry on as before. When Peter takes his sister to a party, Charlie eats cake made with nuts, which she’s badly allergic to. Peter races her to hospital, and what follows is far worse. — Nominated for Best Female Lead (Toni Collette) | Film Independent Spirit Awards | 2019 Nominated for Best First Feature | Film Independent Spirit Awards | 2019

Mike Nichols won the Best Director Oscar for the film that opened the door to New Hollywood, set to Simon & Garfunkel’s iconic songs. It’s hard to believe Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft were only six years apart, and impossible to forget that final shot. — Benjamin comes home to Pasadena with a degree and no idea what to do next, so he spends his days floating in his parents’ pool. When Mrs Robinson, the wife of his father’s business partner, asks him to drive her home, she ends up keeping him in a hotel room all summer long. Then his parents start pushing him to take her daughter out. — Best Director | Oscars | 1968 Nominated for Best Film | Oscars | 1968 Nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Dustin Hoffman) | Oscars | 1968 Nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Anne Bancroft) | Oscars | 1968 Nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Katharine Ross) | Oscars | 1968 Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay | Oscars | 1968 Nominated for Best Cinematography | Oscars | 1968 Best Film - Musical or Comedy | Golden Globes | 1968 Best Director | Golden Globes | 1968 Best Actress - Musical or Comedy (Anne Bancroft) | Golden Globes | 1968

Years before the film won five Oscars, the secret police in Prague seized the copy of Ken Kesey’s novel that Kirk Douglas sent to Miloš Forman. Jack Nicholson lands on a locked psychiatric ward where nobody argues with the head nurse, so he does, and freedom costs more than anything else in there. — Sent from prison to a psychiatric hospital for observation, McMurphy finds a ward run by Nurse Ratched, whose rules bind everyone without exception and which the patients stopped questioning long ago. He questions them on his very first afternoon, and the battle he starts will change everything around him. — Best Film | Oscars | 1976 Best Actor (Jack Nicholson) | Oscars | 1976 Best Actress (Louise Fletcher) | Oscars | 1976 Best Director | Oscars | 1976 Best Adapted Screenplay | Oscars | 1976 Best Film | BAFTA | 1977 Best Actor (Jack Nicholson) | BAFTA | 1977 Best Actress (Louise Fletcher) | BAFTA | 1977 Best Supporting Actor (Brad Dourif) | BAFTA | 1977

Nominated twice for an Oscar, the film that made Rohmer famous is set in Clermont-Ferrand because Pascal was born there. A devout Catholic and a doctor who doesn’t believe end up arguing about Pascal’s wager until morning. — Jean-Louis, a devout engineer in Clermont-Ferrand, has quietly chosen the woman he means to marry when, a week before Christmas, he runs into Vidal, an old acquaintance who teaches philosophy and believes in nothing. Vidal takes him to meet Maud, a doctor who lives alone and argues better than either of them. Then the snow starts to fall, the last bus pulls out, and the conversation carries on. — Nominated for Best Foreign Film | Oscars | 1970 Nominated for Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 1970 Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1969

Forman shot the opera scenes in the Prague theatre where Mozart staged “Don Giovanni”, and the story that won eight Oscars belongs not to the genius but to his envious rival. Salieri hears God in Mozart’s music and can’t believe it comes from a giggling brat. — Antonio Salieri, court composer to the emperor in 18th-century Vienna, once promised God his chastity in exchange for talent. Then Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arrives from Salzburg, loud, vulgar and forever giggling, and Salieri, the only one who can hear how great the music is, begins to wonder whether God is testing him. — Best Film | Oscars | 1985 Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (F. Murray Abraham) | Oscars | 1985 Best Director | Oscars | 1985 Best Adapted Screenplay | Oscars | 1985 Best Costume Design | Oscars | 1985 Best Sound | Oscars | 1985 Best Makeup | Oscars | 1985 Best Production Design | Oscars | 1985 Best Film - Drama | Golden Globes | 1985 Best Foreign Film | César Awards | 1985

Marjane Satrapi first told this story as a comic book, then brought it to the screen herself, with Catherine Deneuve voicing the mother and Chiara Mastroianni the daughter. It’s about growing up in Tehran while a revolution decides what women may do, and the animation hasn’t aged a day. — Nine-year-old Marjane, growing up in Tehran in 1978, has decided she’s going to be a prophet. Politics is what her family talks about over dinner, and the Shah is about to fall. Soon the revolution is deciding what a girl can wear, read and say out loud, until at fourteen her parents send her to Vienna on her own. — Nomination for Best Animated Feature | Oscars | 2008 Jury Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 2007 Best Adapted Screenplay | César Awards | 2008 Best First Film | César Awards | 2008 Audience Award | Rotterdam Film Festival | 2008

No film has been remade more often than this one, and it all started with Paolo Genovese in Rome in 2016. Kasia Smutniak hosts an Italian dinner where seven adults agree to a risky game, and although every one of them has something to hide, lying comes easily in such good company. — On the night of a lunar eclipse in Rome, seven friends sit down to dinner at Eva and Rocco’s. Someone suggests a game: all the phones go in the middle of the table, and every message that comes in will be read out loud. They all agree, because saying no would mean looking like the one with something to hide. — Best Screenplay for an International Narrative Feature | Tribeca Film Festival | 2016

Jim Jarmusch directed this legend of urban cinema and RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan wrote its music. Forest Whitaker plays a Mafia hitman who lives up on a rooftop among his pigeons and follows the code of a three-hundred-year-old samurai handbook. — On the roof of a building in a run-down American city, a hitman raises pigeons, lives by a book of samurai wisdom and works for the gangster who once saved his life. When a job goes wrong through no fault of his own, he becomes the one in the crosshairs. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1999 Nomination for Best Foreign Film | César Awards | 2000

Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder star in a surprising, gripping film from Martin Scorsese, who takes on Edith Wharton’s novel of 19th-century New York society. This time there’s no blood, only corsets, gossip and a love that can never be named. — In 1870s New York, lawyer Newland Archer is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a young and beautiful girl society wholly approves of. Then her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, comes back from Europe having left her husband, and she wants a divorce, which in this world is a huge scandal. As the drawing rooms shut their doors to her one by one, Archer is asked to talk her out of it, but he takes her side instead. From then on, she’s all he can think about. — Best Costume Design | Oscars | 1994 Nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Winona Ryder) | Oscars | 1994 Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay | Oscars | 1994 Nominated for Best Original Score | Oscars | 1994 Nominated for Best Production Design | Oscars | 1994 Best Supporting Actress (Winona Ryder) | Golden Globes | 1994 Nominated for Best Film | Golden Globes | 1994 Nominated for Best Director | Golden Globes | 1994 Nominated for Best Actress - Drama (Michelle Pfeiffer) | Golden Globes | 1994

Catherine Deneuve stars for Luis Buñuel in a scandalous erotic film without a moment of nudity, banned in some countries, dressed by Yves Saint Laurent and awarded the Golden Lion at Venice. Buñuel insisted that only the viewer’s imagination could unlock its secret. — Séverine loves her husband but can’t bear him to touch her. When an acquaintance mentions, almost in passing, a Paris apartment where women receive men in the afternoons, she writes down the address, and one day she rings the bell. Now she works there from two until five under another name, and her husband knows nothing. — Golden Lion | Venice Film Festival | 1967 Pasinetti Award | Venice Film Festival | 1967 Nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Catherine Deneuve) | BAFTA | 1969

A silent man walks out of the Texas desert in search of his wife in the cult road movie that Wim Wenders began shooting with only half a script, and which went on to win the Palme d’Or. It’s a portrait of a lonely America, where Nastassja Kinski in a pink sweater stands for something we’ve all lost. — Silent and apparently without a memory, a man wanders through Texas in punishing heat until he is found unconscious in the desert. His brother, who gave him up for dead years ago, takes him home to the boy he and his wife have been raising, the man’s own son. He won’t say where he has been all this time, and all he wants is to find his wife and take the boy with him. — FIPRESCI Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 1984 Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1984 Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 1984

Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell star in a much-loved romantic classic that still works, years on, as a comedy, an affirmation of life and a lesson in mindfulness. A grumpy, sarcastic TV weatherman is stuck living the same day over and over. Don’t save it for the second of February. — TV weatherman Phil Connors has come from Pittsburgh to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to cover the annual Groundhog Day festivities, and he despises all of it: the town, the festival, the crowds, even the cute animal. To top it off, a blizzard buries the roads and forces him to stay the night. When he wakes up, the radio is playing the same song as yesterday. It’s Groundhog Day again. — Best Original Screenplay | BAFTA | 1994

Oscar-nominated Kate Hudson stars in this atmospheric story of music, writing and growing up, in which a fifteen-year-old hits the road with a band he’s meant to write about for a magazine. Cameron Crowe drew on his own life as Rolling Stone’s youngest contributor, and his screenplay won an Oscar. — In San Diego in 1973, a promising band sets off on tour, and fifteen-year-old William Miller goes along on assignment for Rolling Stone, leaving behind a mother who won’t let rock music through the door. Also along for the ride is a girl who insists on being called Penny Lane. Eventually the musicians work out what the boy actually does for a living. — Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 2001 Nominated for Best Editing | Oscars | 2001 Nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Kate Hudson) | Oscars | 2001 Nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Frances McDormand) | Oscars | 2001 Best Film - Musical or Comedy | Golden Globes | 2001 Best Supporting Actress (Kate Hudson) | Golden Globes | 2001 Nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Frances McDormand) | Golden Globes | 2001 Nominated for Best Screenplay | Golden Globes | 2001

Ever since 1948, people have called it the most beautiful film ever made. Ballerina Moira Shearer spent a year trying to get out of the role until Powell won her over, and she shines in a ballet sequence that runs unbroken for more than ten minutes, as a dancer whose art asks for everything she has. — On tour with a ballet company, young Victoria Page is about to become a star, and Boris Lermontov builds a new production around her. Only then does he discover that she has fallen in love with the composer who wrote its music. Lermontov isn’t prepared to share her, and sooner or later he will make her choose. — Best Set Decoration | Oscars | 1949 Best Original Score | Oscars | 1949 Nomination for Best Film | Oscars | 1949 Nomination for Best Screenplay | Oscars | 1949 Best Original Score | Golden Globes | 1949 Official Selection - International Competition | Venice Film Festival | 1948

Sean Connery and Christian Slater lead Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adaptation of Umberto Eco’s famous novel, one of the most original murder mysteries ever filmed, where faith, learning and power collide. In a fourteenth-century abbey the monks keep dying, and the most popular theory is the Apocalypse. — In a remote fourteenth-century abbey a monk has been found dead, and his brothers are certain the Apocalypse has begun. A gathering of Franciscans is due any day, so a learned friar who has just arrived is asked to find out what happened. More murders follow, and the Inquisition is already on its way. — Best Foreign Film | César Awards | 1987

Jane Campion became the first woman ever to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and eleven-year-old Anna Paquin won an Oscar for the same film. Holly Hunter and Harvey Keitel circle each other in a damp New Zealand colony, where she won’t give an inch and he can’t look away. — In the mid-nineteenth century Ada, who hasn’t spoken since she was six, is sent from Scotland to New Zealand to join a husband she has never met, taking her daughter and her piano with her. Her husband leaves the piano on the beach with no intention of going back for it. A neighbour trades him a plot of land for it, then offers Ada a deal: she can win it back, one key at a time. — Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1993 Best Actress (Holly Hunter) | Cannes Film Festival | 1993 Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Holly Hunter) | Oscars | 1994 Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Anna Paquin) | Oscars | 1994 Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 1994 Nominated for Best Film | Oscars | 1994 Nominated for Best Editing | Oscars | 1994 Nominated for Best Director | Oscars | 1994 Nominated for Best Cinematography | Oscars | 1994 Nominated for Best Costume Design | Oscars | 1994 Best Actress - Drama (Holly Hunter) | Golden Globes | 1994

Amélie Poulain is a lonely Montmartre waitress who notices everything about the people around her and quietly sets about mending strangers’ lives. Paris looks even lovelier than the real thing, Yann Tiersen’s score is one many people still know by heart, and you’ll walk out with a lighter heart. — Amélie Poulain is a shy, kind-hearted waitress in Montmartre. Behind a loose tile in her bathroom she finds a box of treasures a little boy hid there years ago, so she tracks down its owner and gives it back without letting him know who she is. Soon she’s secretly making everyone around her happier, and nobody suspects a thing. Her own life is another matter: she hasn’t even started on that. — Nomination for Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 2002 Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2002 Nomination for Best Cinematography | Oscars | 2002 Nomination for Best Sound | Oscars | 2002 Nomination for Best Art Direction | Oscars | 2002 Best Original Screenplay | BAFTA Awards | 2002 Best Film | César Awards | 2002 Best Director | César Awards | 2002 Best Music | César Awards | 2002 Best European Film | European Film Awards | 2001

Even at their closest, they’re still a millimetre apart. Wong Kar-Wai (“In the Mood for Love”) wrote each scene in the morning and shot it that night, all in two weeks, and his cult film became the first release from Tarantino’s label. A cop, a wig, and “California Dreamin’” playing again next door. — Every day Cop 223 buys a tin of pineapple with a 1 May expiry date, because that’s the day he has promised himself he’ll stop pining. He can’t take his eyes off a woman in a blonde wig, never guessing that she deals drugs. Cop 663 has just been dumped as well, and his ex-girlfriend leaves the keys with the snack bar next door. — Official Selection | Locarno International Film Festival | 1994 Best Picture | Hong Kong Film Awards | 1995 Best Director | Hong Kong Film Awards | 1995 Best Actor (Tony Leung) | Hong Kong Film Awards | 1995 Best Actress (Faye Wong) | Stockholm Film Festival | 1994