Oscars

The cinematic triumph of Cinobo-favourite Bong Joon-ho. A stylistic apotheosis filled with suspense and a piercing social commentary that defies genre. Rightful winner of the Palm d’ Or and the Best Picture Oscar that made Academy history. — The Kims are a loving family, but they are all unemployed and their future seems gloom. The son of the family finds a job as a private tutor and can finally hope for a steady income. Carrying the whole family’s expectations, he goes to interview at the Park household – owners of an international tech company – where he will meet the lady of the house. After that first meeting, a cascade of unfortunate events begins. — Best Film | Oscars | 2020 Best Director | Oscars | 2020 Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 2020 Best International Feature Film | Oscars | 2020 Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 2019

An Oscar triumph that will be remembered as one of the most eventful wins in history. A black boy grows up and discovers his sexuality through three decisive stages of his life. Academy Awards for Best Picture and Supporting Actor for Mahershala Ali and a watershed moment for American indie cinema. — A timeless story of human connection and reconciliation with oneself, "Moonlight" tells the story of a man's life, beginning in childhood and through adulthood, as he struggles to find his place in the world. A vital portrait of the life of a contemporary African American man and a poetic reflection on identity, family, friendship and love, full of deep compassion and universal truths. — Best Film | Oscars | 2017 Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Mahershala Ali) | Oscars | 2017 Best Adapted Screenplay | Oscars | 2017

Clint Eastwood’s knockout film won four Oscars, for Best Picture, Best Director, Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman. An old trainer refuses to take on a thirty-year-old boxer, but she comes back every day to fight him on it, and this is one bout you can’t walk out of before the final bell. — Frankie Dunn has spent decades training boxers in a run-down Los Angeles gym, keeping everyone at arm’s length except Eddie, a former fighter who now sweeps the floor. Then Maggie walks in, a thirty-one-year-old waitress who grew up poor in Missouri, and asks Frankie to train her. He doesn’t train women, but the next day she’s back. — Best Film | Oscars | 2005 Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Hilary Swank) | Oscars | 2005 Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Morgan Freeman) | Oscars | 2005 Best Director | Oscars | 2005 Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture Drama (Hilary Swank) | Golden Globes | 2005 Best Director | Golden Globes | 2005 Best Foreign Film | César Awards | 2006

Master of biopics, Pablo Larraín, closes the cycle of his Grand Dames (“Jackie”, “Spencer”) with an unconventional, mesmerizing and deeply cinematic look at the last days of the ultimate diva. Filming in Greece and the role of a lifetime for Angelina Jolie. — 1977: Maria Callas, once the world's greatest opera diva, lives in isolation in Paris with her staff and her two poodles. Her health is getting worse and worse. Then she receives a request to go back on tour. Will the Divina sing again? And if so, for whom? — Official Selection - International Competition | Venice Film Festival | 2024 Nomination for Best Cinematography | Oscars | 2025 Nomination for Actress in a Leading Role (Angelina Jolie) | Golden Globes | 2025

What's the flip side of the Disney dream? Next to the dreamy Florida Disneyworld, children build their own dominions and struggle to survive. Little chunks of life, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, in a colorful paradigm of contemporary neorealist cinema. — This is the story of a wild 6-year-old and her fearless friends. Their summer is full of wonders, bewilderment and exciting adventures, while the adults around them have to face a harsh reality. — Nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Willem Dafoe) | Oscars | 2018

Another honest drama from the talented director Asghar Farhadi, awarded by the Academy with the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. A story so powerful that it touches your soul. — A couple is forced to leave their Tehran apartment, which is falling to pieces, and move into another one. While working together on the production of the play "Death of a Salesman", their relationship begins to change. — Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2017 Best Actor (Shahab Hosseini) | Cannes Film Festival | 2016 Best Screenplay | Cannes Film Festival | 2016

The great Andrey Zvyagintsev stages the disappearance of a young boy and gradually and masterfully orchestrates a cinematic requiem about the dissolution of family ties, the absence of love and the deathly apathy of a slowly dying Russia. — A couple splits up and their divorce is full of disappointment, bitterness and insults. Having already found new partners, the ex-spouses cannot wait to turn the page and start their new lives. Even if that means abandoning their 12-year-old son. — Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2018 Jury Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 2017 Best Foreign Film | César Awards | 2018 Best Film | London Film Festival | 2017

Hayao Miyazaki picked a Dutch animator who had never directed a feature to make Studio Ghibli’s first film outside Japan, and it was Oscar-nominated. It’s almost wordless and dazzling to look at, the story of one man alone with nature and a red turtle that won’t let him go. — A castaway washes up on a beautiful desert island where the only other inhabitants are birds, reptiles and crabs. Every time he tries to escape on a raft, a red turtle stops him. Then the animal turns into a woman, and a feeling neither of them saw coming begins to grow between them. — Nominated for Best Animated Feature | Oscars | 2017 Audience Award | Athens International Film Festival | 2016 Special Mention | Athens International Film Festival | 2016 Special Jury Prize - Un Certain Regard | Cannes Film Festival | 2016

Irresistibly humane and emotionally disarming, hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time, this is the film that firmly placed Maren Ade among the elite of world cinema. A cinematic experience that feels like a hearty embrace. — A father who delights in pranks tries to get close to his daughter by sneaking into her life, business meetings and nights out. Annoyed, she asks him to stop, but then Toni Erdmann shows up. Her father's alter ego, a peculiar guy in an ugly suit, a terrible wig and an even worse pair of teeth. Oddly enough, the more eccentric he becomes, the more his daughter seems to respond. — Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2017 FIPRESCI Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 2016 FIPRESCI Prize | San Sebastián Film Festival | 2016

Romeo and Juliette in Oceania. Τhe first film entirely shot in the Pacific island Vanuatu was awarded in the Venice Film Festival and nominated for a Best Foreign Language Oscar. A vibrant, wonderful crowd-pleaser from Australia. — Somewhere in the South Pacific, a young girl from one of the last traditional tribes in Tanna falls in love with the leader's grandson. While an interracial war begins and escalates, the couple attempts to escape in order to live in peace. Yet, they must choose between their powerful emotions and the future of their tribes. — Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2017 Special Jury Prize | London Film Festival | 2015 Best Cinematography | Venice Film Festival | 2015 International Critics' Week Award | Venice Film Festival | 2015

Céline Sciamma, director of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”, wrote this Oscar-nominated animation for children and adults alike. It follows a boy who ends up in a children’s home after his mother dies, and it’s an unusually tender story about friendship and growing up. — Courgette is a strange nickname for a nine-year-old boy, but it’s what his mother called him. After a tragic loss he lands in a children’s home, where it’s hard to fit in among strangers who aren’t always kind. With the help of a policeman and his new friends, though, he learns to trust, and discovers that family sometimes turns up where you’d least expect it. — Nominated for Best Animated Feature | Oscars | 2017 Best Adapted Screenplay | César Awards | 2017 Best Animated Film | César Awards | 2017 Audience Award European Film | San Sebastián Film Festival | 2016

In one of the most touching and emotionally rich films of the decade, time goes back and forth, mixing passion, misfortunes, love at first sight and unbearable sorrow, under the rousing sounds of bluegrass music. — Elise and Didier have shared 7 loving years, yet they miss their passionate beginnings, their early marriage and the happy days when Mabel first came into their lives. A complete cycle of happiness ends when Mabel is diagnosed with a serious illness. The sadness and fear for their young daughter inevitably takes them towards different directions. — Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2014 Audience Award | Panorama Berlin International Film Festival | 2013 Lux Prize | European Audience Awards | 2013 Best Screenplay | Tribeca Film Festival | 2013

Taking their deeply humane and political movies one step further, the Dardenne brothers cooperate with Marion Cotillard in this shocking travelogue of a woman who is trying to maintain her job and especially her dignity in the years of the economic crisis. — A young wife and mother works in a factory in a small Belgian town. In her absence, her colleagues realize that they can cover her shift with small overtimes and monetary bonuses. Her fate lies in the hands of 16 workers, whom she must convince to refuse monetary bonuses in order to keep her job. She enters a battle to save her seat, two days and one night, before the final vote. — Nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Marion Cotillard) | Oscars | 2015 Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2014 Best Film | Sydney Film Festival | 2014

Free will? What is that? A cynical deconstruction of life’s unpredictability owing to an innovative combination of fiction and documentary by Alain Resnais, which dissociates us from fairy tales and encourages us to look at ourselves in the face - along with a few mice. — The intersecting stories of three people and the important decisions they have to take at some point in their lives, are used to develop Henri Laborit's theories about human behavior and the relationship between individuals and society. — Nominated for Best Screenplay | Oscars | 1981 FIPRESCI Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 1980 Grand Prize of the Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 1980 AGIS Award | Venice Film Festival | 1980

Charlie Chaplin plays an old clown trying to convince a young dancer that life is worth living, and for the only time he shares the screen with Buster Keaton. The film brought him his only competitive Oscar, though he had to wait twenty years for it. — Calvero was once the biggest comic in the English music hall, but by 1914 he’s a drunk nobody in London will hire. One evening he comes home to find his neighbour unconscious after trying to take her own life. Terry is a dancer, convinced that her legs are paralysed and her career is over, and getting her back on her feet gives Calvero back something he had lost as well: his sense of his own worth. — Best Original Music | Oscars | 1973

Innocence’s epilogue was brought upon by the war and the transformation of the once funny jester into a delightfully cynical figure was something that the world was not yet ready to digest. Although unfavourably acclaimed in its time, it’s now regarded, not unfairly, as his black masterpiece. — Inspired by notorious French serial killer Landru, Henri Verdoux lures wealthy women by promising them sweet happy-everafters. After the wedding bells chime, however, he murders them for their fortunes. In this particularly dark comedy, Chaplin questions our perception of evil: isn’t this refined criminal a mere amateur compared to weapons suppliers and dictators? We stand ready to condemn a murderer, but when war victims are counted in millions, we celebrate a hero! — Nominated for Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 1948

Delirium made at a time when silent cinema was perfected, just before its inglorious finale foreseen by Chaplin, who honors the genre along with all the kinds of physical comedy that had entertained generations of audiences and were about to give way to something new. — The Little Tramp is hired by a circus and soon becomes the main attraction when his comedic blunders drive the crowd wild. Having fallen in love with the ringmaster’s daughter, he doesn’t even realize he is the show’s main feature. In this high-flying comedy, we are quickly caught up in Chaplin’s whirlwind of gags, where even the acrobats and clowns watch his show-stopping stunts from the sidelines. — Honorary Award | Oscars | 1929

Poetry in motion; the triumph of choreographed kinesiology that shaped the anarchic rules of the silent cinema in the best and purest full-length comedy of Chaplin's silent period. — An adventurer embarks on the great journey to Alaska, where he hopes to discover gold. There he will end up fighting for survival, getting involved in hilarious adventures and falling in love. — Nominated for Best Sound Recording | Oscars | 1943 Nominated for Best Music | Oscars | 1943

Chaplin had kept silent on screen for years, and the voice he finally found in 1940 was aimed squarely at Hitler. He made the most humane film of his career as a satire of a world with five more tragic years still ahead, and it ends by reminding us that we think too much and feel too little. — Adenoid Hynkel rules Tomania and means to rule a great deal more. A Jewish barber, meanwhile, comes back to the ghetto after twenty years in a military hospital, unaware that anything has changed, and when he reopens his shop he gets in the way of stormtroopers who have come to smash its window. Chaplin wrote, directed and plays both men, because the dictator and the barber have exactly the same face. — Nominated for Best Picture | Oscars | 1941 Nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Charles Chaplin) | Oscars | 1941 Nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Jack Oakie) | Oscars | 1941 Nominated for Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 1941 Nominated for Best Original Score | Oscars | 1941

Truffaut has never been lighter or funnier than in this next chapter of Antoine Doinel’s life, which is indecently charming and packed with nods to other films. It sings the praises of love affairs, the kind that send you soaring and then smash you to pieces. — Antoine is fresh out of the army in 1968 Paris and finding grown-up life hard going, both at work and in love. He takes a job as a private detective and falls madly for an older woman, the wife of a shoe shop owner. Not that he’s quite let go of Christine, his old girlfriend. — Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 1969

Truffaut was still a boy when his own father handed him over to the police, and years later that memory became a film. Jean-Pierre Léaud, cast in the lead, never memorised his lines but spoke in his own words. Blow after blow, you feel how cruel childhood can be. — Antoine Doinel makes his first appearance as an unruly boy growing up in a cramped Paris flat with a family that doesn’t understand him. He skips school, steals and suffers under a teacher who has it in for him, until an arrest lands him in a cell overnight with prostitutes and thieves. The court sends him to a reform school, but Antoine escapes, in search of freedom. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1959 Best Director | Cannes Film Festival | 1959 OCIC Award | Cannes Film Festival | 1959

Under the Occupation, every show had to end in time for the audience to catch the last metro before curfew. Truffaut pits artists against the Nazis as Catherine Deneuve keeps her theatre going while its Jewish director hides beneath the stage. The romance is straight out of “Casablanca”. — In Paris in 1942, a theatre in Montmartre casts a young man in the lead of its play, an actor who is also a member of the Resistance. His leading lady is the theatre’s owner, beautiful if not especially likeable, who is hiding her Jewish husband in the cellar beneath the stage. Opening night is a triumph, and then an antisemitic critic sets his sights on the show. — Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 1981 Best Film | César Awards | 1981 Best Cinematography | César Awards | 1981

Catherine Deneuve, her sister Françoise Dorléac and a dubbed Gene Kelly star in a dazzlingly colourful musical romance with a murder lurking in the background. Before he shot a single frame, Jacques Demy (“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”) had thousands of shutters across Rochefort repainted. — In Rochefort, on the Atlantic coast, twin sisters teach dance and music and dream of finding romance and love in Paris. Then the summer fair rolls into town, bringing caravans, sailors and a troupe of travelling performers with it. What neither of them knows is that the answer to their dreams is only a few streets away. — Nominated for Best Music Score | Oscars | 1969

Nobody speaks in Jacques Demy’s Palme d’Or winner. Every word is sung to Michel Legrand’s music, right down to the small talk in a car repair garage, and with a twenty-year-old Catherine Deneuve at its heart, it’s the kind of film that shows you why people love cinema. — Geneviève, who lives above her mother’s umbrella shop in Cherbourg, is in love with Guy, a twenty-year-old mechanic, and the two are secretly planning to marry over her mother’s objections. Then Guy is called up and sent to Algeria, and Geneviève discovers she’s pregnant. Her mother’s advice is to say yes to a wealthy merchant who has asked for her hand. — Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 1965 Nominated for Best Original Song | Oscars | 1966 Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1964 OCIC Award | Cannes Film Festival | 1964