One quarter of the way through the 21st century, what are the outstanding movies of our epoch?
We all know the big corporate blockbusters that have dominated the box office; they’re inescapable and built to self-destruct in the brain.
But in this program, we’re trying to look a little further afield and extend the conversation, to showcase international cinema; movies which speak to our times and push out the boundaries of the art form. These are true modern classics, and we’re confident they will withstand the test of time.
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Margaret
Seventeen-year-old Lisa is rocked with guilt after a woman is killed in a traffic accident. But that’s only one thread in a teeming social tapestry this intense, passionate teen must negotiate as she comes of age in a time of contradiction and confusion.
Certain Women
Spare, incisive portraits of four Montana women (Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone) brushing up against the everyday wears and tears of difficult men, their own circumstances, and the desire for something better.
In the Mood for Love
Wong Kar-wai's most acclaimed and popular film is a love story about two neighbours (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung) who are drawn together by the long absences of their respective spouses + a newly released short companion piece from 2001.
Toni Erdmann
This hilarious and acerbic comedy follows a retiree as he stages a series of outrageous pranks to disrupt his executive daughter's latest business deal.
Shoplifters
A Palme d'or winner in 2018, Shoplifters is both a hard-edged and heartwarming drama about a makeshift family of impoverished urchins and orphans in contemporary Tokyo.
Melancholia
Lars von Trier squares up to the end times with this grandly luxuriant but surprisingly punky sci-fi, set in an imposing country mansion house, where Justine (Kirsten Dunst) blows up what's supposed to be the happiest day of her life.
Paprika
A device capable of transmitting dreams falls into the wrong hands in this dazzling anime meta-movie from visionary filmmaker Satoshi Kon. The imagery here is never less than overwhelming; it's probably the greatest scifi movie of our times.
Moonlight
Moonlight is many things -- a portrait of a young black man coming of age in Miami in the 1980s, a film about fathers and sons, about mentorship and about the scourge of drugs -- but it is also one of the most piercing movie romances of the last decade.
Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood
A film of luxuriant and sinister beauty, Tarantino's last movie to date is a rich and lovely immersion in the dying days of Old Hollywood, LA, 1969.
Petite Maman
This "small" film from the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire speaks volumes. It's a poetical modern fairy tale about an 8-year-old girl who meets a new friend her own age in the woods behind her late grandmother's house.
Synecdoche, New York
Charlie Kaufman wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- all great, all successful -- then turned director with Synecdoche, which is a masterpiece and which basically went unseen. It's overdue rediscovery.
Audience Choice: The Best Film of the 21st Century
What do you think belongs on our list of 21st Century Classics? Vote for your favourite from the top four submitted films and it could be chosen to play at the VIFF Centre.
Oldboy
The second movie in Park's Vengeance Trilogy. Choi Min-sik stars as Dae Su, inexplicably held captive by he-knows-not-who for 15 years, and then, just as inexplicably, released. Not surprisingly, after all this time, he has only one thing on his mind...
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Children of Men
2027: 18 years since the last baby was born, disillusioned Englishman Theo (Clive Owen) becomes an unlikely champion of the human race when he is asked by his former lover (Julianne Moore) to escort a young pregnant woman out of the country.
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The Gleaners and I
This lovely essay film about the art of foraging is also a self portrait of the artist at 72.
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The Headless Woman
The pictures tell the story -- and you better not blink -- when Veronica (the superb Maria Onetto) hits something on the road home. But what? She is too traumatized, or panic-stricken, to go back and look, and her fears are too terrible to acknowledge.
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A Serious Man
The Coen brothers' best movie is a painfully funny existentialist comedy about a physics professor, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlberg), benumbed but bewildered by his wife's announcement that she wants a divorce. That's only the start of his troubles.
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The White Ribbon
A German village in 1913 is rocked by a series of macabre events. Michael Haneke's most expansive filmm a Palme d'Or winner, explores the roots of fascism.
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Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Neither a fairytale, nor a Leonesque shoot-em-up, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's somber, melancholy masterpiece is both a ruminative comedy about mortality and a subtle, poignant murder mystery.
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Under the Skin
Between Birth and the death camps of Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer gave us sex, with Scarlett Johansson, picking up and disposing with interchangeable men. It's a bleakly unforgettable movie, with a mesmeric Mica Levi score.
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It's Not Me
“Where are you at, Leos Carax?” To this question, the French filmmaker assembles an unpredictable essay-film made in the spirit of the late Jean-Luc Godard — an endlessly inventive self-portrait of an artist reflecting on his place in cinema history.
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Holy Motors
Carax's film a dazzler, a requiem for cinema that somehow breathes new life and new hope into the form. Denis Lavant (Beau Travail) plays 11 roles and the accordion. Absurdist, surreal, poignant and unforgettable, this is truly one of a kind.
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Enter the Void
Venturing where angels fear to tread, virtuoso filmmaker Gaspar Noé (Vortex) creates a dazzling journey into the Tokyo night, a mind-bending exploration of the outer reaches of human experience inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
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