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American actor working across independent drama and large action franchises.

Canadian actor who moves between independent drama and studio filmmaking.

American actor and the original Rick Deckard, Han Solo and Indiana Jones.

Two American thrillers released within three months of each other in 1995 set the terms for the twenty years that followed.

Procedure as horror

Se7en took the serial-killer film and removed the chase. The detectives arrive after each murder, read what has been left for them, and are outpaced from the first scene. The killer is not hunted down; he walks into a police station. What replaced the chase was procedure — evidence, libraries, paperwork — and the discovery that procedure does not save anybody.

Three films in five years re-established that a science fiction blockbuster can be quiet.

Arrival

Arrival's central problem is grammar. The threat comes from twelve governments running twelve incompatible translations, not from the visitors, and the film spends its running time on the work of understanding rather than on the consequences of failing to.

In February 2020 Parasite became the first film not in English to win Best Picture, and the first film ever to win both that and the Palme d'Or.

What actually changed

Subtitled films did not suddenly become mainstream in the United States. What changed was distribution: streaming services began commissioning and promoting non-English originals at scale, and the assumption that a subtitled film needed an English-language remake weakened considerably.

Thirty years of films, no continuity between them, and no correct order. Some starting points are better than others.

Start with Spirited Away

It is the most complete statement of what the studio does: a competent child in a world with rules nobody explains. If it does not work for you, the rest probably will not either.

Not the ten best. The ten that other films started copying.

A short list for anyone catching up in the fortnight before an awards ceremony, and a note on how to use it.

Watch the winners you have not seen

Best Picture winners are a poor guide to quality and a good guide to what the industry thought of itself that year. Oppenheimer, Everything Everywhere All at Once and Parasite are all worth the time on their own terms as well.