Cinema is changing. Hollywood and Marvel may dominate the multiplexes, but in the past decade the river of cinema has become a delta. It has widened, with more channels, more types of people making films, from more places and perspectives. My new documentary, The Story of Film: A New Generation, reflects that growth.
I use clips from 96 films to look at what has happened in cinema in the past decade. Some of the clips are from big American films such as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Frozen and Joker, but many are from other film cultures — Hungarian, Polish, Senegalese, Swedish or Thai films with a different sense of irony, character or landscape.
I’ve chosen ten here. Each opened up a box in my head that I didn’t quite know was there. Or took me somewhere I didn’t know I wanted to go. Cinema is good at this. Less conventional films are like Tardises that teleport us suddenly to somewhere visually and emotionally elsewhere. They take us on holiday, and when you’re on holiday you’re more open to pleasure. You try things you might not normally try. Nowadays you can explore from the comfort of your home; they are all available to stream.
It’s often said that audiences don’t want new or challenging things. But audiences didn’t know that they wanted David Bowie or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and they were transported by each.
The following films might transport you. Each uses imagery, acting or story in a new way to show us desire, history, politics, surrealism, dreaming or joy.
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I wrote the book The Story of Film, on which my documentary is based, when I was in my late thirties. Now I’m in my mid-fifties — transformed, sadder but more alive. In these years cinema has transformed and is more alive too.
Hungary
On Body and Soul
Mubi/Amazon
There are so many films about love, but this haunting one by acclaimed Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi is one of the most visual and precise. A man and woman work in an abattoir. They’re tentatively attracted to each other and neurodiverse. Shy in real life, they find that in their dreams they are similar, freer, like deer in a forest.
Poland
Cold War
Amazon
This multiple Oscar-nominated film is about another couple entranced by each other. She’s a singer; he’s a musician who’s setting up a folk ensemble. But we’re in Soviet-era Poland, so ideology and the Cold War intervene. History films can be baggy, but this one is diamond-sharp.
India
PK
Netflix
Indian cinema is a vast parallel universe about which many westerners know little. This comedy, for example, is one of the biggest films of our time, and innovates with form and tone. The superstar Aamir Khan plays an unblinking alien who looks at gender, caste and sectarianism in India with fresh eyes. Hugely entertaining and chromatic, the film has a shocking twist that lifts it to another level.
Senegal
Atlantics
Netflix
There have been so many films about migration, but this one, rooted in Senegal, looks through a migrant’s eyes towards Europe. Director Mati Diop transforms her theme by adding gothic elements, a kind of zombie sadness. What a rich and valuable movie.
North Korea
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Propaganda
YouTube
This documentary was made in North Korea and uses a kaleidoscopic montage of clips of western TV, advertising and news reports to skewer the consumerism and conformism of western life. Except nothing is what it seems. Astonishing.
Iran
Border
modernfilms.com
From films that make us see love and politics anew, to two that open up the secret boxes about bodies. In this one a woman who identifies more with a fox than human beings suddenly meets a man who is like her. The recognition is overwhelming. She is no longer a freak. Their sex scene is one of the strangest in the movies; Ali Abbasi’s unpredictable film challenges what we think about beauty and intimacy.
France
Evolution
BFI Player/Amazon
Over the past 20 years French director Lucile Hadzihalilovic has become one of the most transgressive film-makers of our times. In its penumbral dreamscapes, this movie about a boy, a world of women and seascapes out-Lynch’s David Lynch. Evolution seems to draw from a deep psychoanalytic well and is a visual marvel.
France
Holy Motors
Mubi
What if you woke up in a bedroom, pushed at the wall and it opened into a parallel universe? Many of the great films of our time are about such world shifts. In Leos Carax’s parallel universe we find a kind of visual opera. There are surreal collisions: Kylie Minogue looking as if she’s in a French film of the 1930s, a man with multiple characters, limousines, a constant sense of the subterranean. One of the most acclaimed films of our times.
Thailand
Cemetery of Splendour
BFI Player
In The Story of Film: A New Generation I give this film pole position because it so evokes what movies are. A soldier is resting in a hospital ward. A carer sits beside him. Do they fall asleep together? And do they meet in their dreams? Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film feels Buddhist and completely inventive. It delivers a series of unhurried revelations.
Italy
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Happy as Lazzaro
BFI Player
Finally, in an age of doubt and perhaps cynicism, a film about pure goodness and joy. Italian director Alice Rohrwacher focuses on a quiet young man who helps out on a farm whose workers are exploited. He’s almost saintly, but then time passes, Italian life gets more perilous, yet — without giving too much away — Lazzaro is immune to the perils. He seems vaccinated. A film to fall in love with.
Mark Cousins’s The Story of Film: A New Generation (cert 15) is in cinemas from Dec 17. Tickets and info: the-story-of-film.com