Almost a century ago, audiences gathered in theaters so as to behold Maria Falconetti’s face in “The Passion of Joan of Arc” and drift on all those layers of emotion that pulse behind that sight. Some decades later, audiences stared at Andrei Tarkovsky’s foggy dreams as taking the shape of a perceptible object on the big screen, or even navigated through the psychographic labyrinths of chromatic antitheses that emerge in Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema.

Nowadays, after all these years of climactic creativity and rapid technological progress, it has been clear: Cinema is the art of capturing the ineffable; it’s the art of expressing the deepest and the most elusive ingredient of a human’s mind, projecting it on a canvas of color, shadow, wonder, and perspective.

Providing all these forms of artistic expression and creation, cinema comprises its own language and has the ability to deliver very organically and independently almost any kind of content. But even within this semiological context, the seventh art has incorporated glorious moments of oral expression. Films amaze through a wide variety of textures and qualities, but still, dialogue can sometimes be the predominant advantage of a motion picture. Let’s have a look at some of the most clever, comprehensive and well-composed film dialogues of all-time.

10. Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Perceived as a weird dream or as a political parody, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” is definitely one of the most well-crafted black comedies of all-time. At first sight, the exposure of realistic characters and situations under a quite surrealistic light makes one wonder if the natural response requires laughter or terror. This is exactly the film’s power: it comprises a spectacle that you can easier experience than understand.

Unlike any other film about Cold War, “Dr. Strangelove” keeps the pitch-black ambience of the setting as an element of the high contrast black-and-white synthesis of its frame, while the story’s absurd mood is centered on the observation of intensely caricatured army officers, delightfully embodied by a flawless cast, including Peter Sellers and George C. Scott. Throughout the film’s entire timespan, these characters shine on a thin line that defines the contact spot of the darkest and paler aspect of the human psyche.

Like the finest distillation of a thought-out script, the picture’s dialogue content remains absolutely brilliant from the first moment until the last. Simultaneously wry, psychographic and allegoric, every single conversation in this film exposes an aspect of the timeless political chaos, while reporting the era’s sociopolitical manias. Remaining at the lonely top of its own unique genre, “Dr. Strangelove” is a bold satire which observes the leaders and lawmakers through a deforming prism which denotes the humane.

9. Claire’s Knee (1970)

Éric Rohmer’s films always express their anthropocentric gravity center through profound, character-driven plots. Being a significant member of the French New Wave society, Rohmer dealt with innovative subjects, which were consistently emerging on his own artistic canvas, by means of cinematic language and aesthetics.

His 1970 “Claire’s Knee,” as abstracted in its official poster, could reenact in cinematic terms a nude portrait that contains so much of substance in just one frame. The story is focused on Jerome, a middle-aged intellectual, whose erotic appetites wigwag between two significantly younger yet diverse girl figures during his summer vacation at a lakeside resort.

Is this the portrait of a womanizer? Jerome seems to represent the kind of middle-aged men that are found in denial of aging, seeking self-acknowledgement through meaningless sexual involvement. Yet, on this over-exposed postcard of a psychosomatic trip, Jerome appears to be the most naked character of all. Along the way of a well-deliberated sequence of conversations, “Claire’s Knee” succeeds in becoming a painstaking study of the erotic behaviors and interactions. This is Éric Rohmer at his best.

8. Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)

“Cigarettes and coffee, man, that’s a combination”…

You can almost smell the smoky scent of this film, mixed with the diffused abashment of its characters, as it flows over that chess board table. It is one of those films that one starts to watch in curiosity. And then, while watching the subtle yet aching conversation depicted, a decisive conclusion occurs: Jim Jarmusch has got the style, but he’s also got something to say.

Artists, aspiring lovers, and alienated relatives: at the end of the day, they’re all ordinary people that could make an effort of communication, accompanied by coffee and cigarettes. If one attempts to watch people talking in coffee places and bars, they would easily fathom the feelings emerging in facial expression, in body language, even in disguised words.

“Coffee and Cigarettes” suggests that in a world of organized rules and chaotic dispersion of behavioral standards, it’s not easy to be yourself. Still, among a welter of words that occupy the void of social diversity, everybody finds a meeting point at the level of bad habits. In Jarmusch’s cinema the ordinary and the paradoxical are two aspects of the same coin, whereas Nicola Tesla’s theories meet the modern indie culture.

7. Spider (2002)

As in the case of most of David Cronenberg’s films, “Spider” isn’t really an easy task. The viewer must attempt a hard effort in order to relate with the mentally ill hero of this story, or even just comprehend some aspects of his mental state. In the end, the plot’s oddities have led to the mere observation of a psychotic or the dialogue’s shiny edges of intellect have subtly unlocked the tight mysteries of this disturbed heart.

Embodied by Ralph Fiennes in a way that creates chills all along the spine, the film’s main character is introduced to the viewer as he moves from a mental hospital to a halfway house. A sequence of associative thoughts progressively interlaces the spider net of his mind, which spins around the epicenter of one dominant figure: his mother. Every woman he meets is a twisted version of his deceased mother, whose violent dead traumatized his childhood.

Engulfed in the abyss of his stained past, he has become a spider that ambulates on the trembling pathways of his labyrinthine net. In the middle of it, a both beloved and hated mother holds all of the threads. Her words to her son about her own invisible net will hunt you forever.

6. American Beauty (1999)

Existential topics have always been in the foreground of the universal cinematic landscape, approached by various psychological aspects and projected under diverse cultural lenses. The seventh art’s legacy counts numerous existential masterpieces that have exposed and dealt with all of the elusive humane ingredients. Repeatedly viewed and well-discussed by a wide audience since its occurrence, “American Beauty” occupies a sole mountaintop of aesthetical and contextual glory.

Of course, Lester Burnham is the tragic hero of this dark anthropocentric piece— the loveless, the ordinary, and the philosopher of his own routine. But all of the rest main characters assist the hopeless daily flood of existence that moves underground until drowning everyone and everything in its untold misery.

In its fragile silences, in its hunting melodies, as well as in the hidden glances of its solitary creatures, “American Beauty” portrays an aspect of modern corruption and alienation that used to be more than real back then, as it still does today. A painful emotion is always triggered by the experience of Lester’s life, springing from its simultaneous emotional beauty and ugliness.

Dominating a place of pictorial beauty and social incisiveness, Sam Mendes’s emblematic work is much more than an over-rated Oscar winner. In terms of allegory, rawness of content, dialogue and aesthetics, this picture is one of a kind.

We desire, we fall in love. We are haunted by curves and scents. Since when do all these inexplicable processes begin to evolve in one’s body and soul? Even before we receive our mother’s milk for the first time, sexuality is already rooted somewhere in the tender soil of subconscious. A shapeless shadow of sexual nature patiently rests, until a bright sunbeam of carnal stimulation comes to enlighten all these instincts into their full appreciable body.

Those first moments of sexual apperception define one of the most significant stages of life. A child fights a man in the territory of one body. A woman displaces a delicate girl from an inner kingdom. Such procedures are never simple, never direct, and never clear. Let’s observe them through the artistic sphere of cinema. The following are some of the best films ever made about the subject.

10. Attenberg (2010)

Athina Rachel Tsangari’s distant observation on the humankind, as it emerges in her 2010 “Attenberg,” perhaps comprises the most existential piece of the “New Greek Weird Wave.” Bizarre, even deformed and colorless in a unique way, this story is the projection of an ingredient deeply rooted yet constantly obvious in a pitch-black miniature society.

The film is focused on Marina, a 23-year-old girl who stands numb toward the world, while trying to decode the functions of her own mind and body. During the film’s opening scene, Marina is taught how to kiss by her unique girlfriend. The two of them have defined a personal sphere of reality— a one-way permeable fishbowl of senses that allows constant recycling of juvenile manners mixed with an odd constituent of adulthood.

Placed in a contemporary small-scale urban environment of silent pain and loneliness, the story’s tragic heroine appears as a curio in flesh and bones. Still, if one reverses the direction of the lens, the curio of our own world appears huge and firm. In Marina’s ostensibly maladjusted mind lives a child that denies coming of age and adopting the typical behavioral trends of adults. Her long-lasting sexual sleep is now interrupted so as to induct her in the cursed sanctum she has always been ignoring.

9. A Swedish Love Story (1970)

Quite before the occurrence of the tragicomic cinematic absurdity that established Roy Andersson as a groundbreaking arthouse director, the tender-hearted foundation of his 1970 “A Swedish Love Story” signified a primal glimpse of an insightful intelligence. Simplistic and honest, this story is found on a raw, glaringly textured slice of life.

Annika and Pär are two teenagers seeking love and attention in a materialistic world of egocentricity and emotional corruption. In each other’s eyes, both of them discover an inner destination.

Their relationship describes the features of an adult relationship, as their mood for exploring the limits of their sexuality progressively increases and expands. We see two children digging out the deep-seated carnal instincts of two lovers. But this is something bigger than a physical need.

Andersson’s first feature film, if watched carefully and critically, delves into the psychological labyrinths of two true-to-life teenage minds suffering from a primal form of deprivation. Approached with sympathy, their sexuality is here reordered on the fundamental bedrock of their emotional and spiritual substance.

8. À Nos Amours (1983)

You’ve met girls like her many times: she’s a classmate, a cousin, or maybe a friend. She’s the one carrying a bad fame. Why does she need all these lovers? Meeting Sandrine Bonnaire’s character in “À Nos Amours,” you get the answer— an answer raw, painful and entirely true.

Her home is a sad place. Reflective fragments of her parents’ broken marriage pierce Suzanne’s heart every single day. Her nights are given to temporary lover and romancers. During this course, a child escapes from home and hides all the pain under the newly shaped allures of a woman. Suzanne is lost and found somewhere there…

Still juvenile in a refreshing manner and aptly complex, Suzanne’s character becomes almost tangible in the viewer’s hands, being both very well-crafted and embodies by the arguably intelligent Bonnaire. “À Nos Amours,” seen through this girl’s eyes, is definitely a cinematic experience that aches, deserving all that sentimental sweat and toil while caressing the hurt skin of adolescence’s delicate sexuality.

7. The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015)

One can never be truly prepared to deal with the teenage mind set-up exposed in “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.” This is an absolutely audacious art piece by the emergent female director Marielle Heller. Referring to the 1970s decade, the film employs the old-fashioned extravaganza of a cult era as exploring timeless issues of adolescence.

The story’s young heroine is a thirsty for life yet sentimentally clumsy girl called Minnie. We meet her the day she triumphantly confesses to her diary that she just had sex for the first time. And then, a breathtaking apposition of happenings reveals how Minnie and her mother’s boyfriend became lovers. Still, Heller essentially shows how her heroine’s explosive occurrence of sexuality is used simultaneously used as a weapon and a shield.

Thorough, bold, and captivating in an absurd way, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” is an amazing film exploring the both dark and bright nature of a teenage mind. You can discover laughter, tears, even a breath of deep fear in this film’s paths and corners. In the end, you know that Minnie, as placed in her environment and shaped by her thoughts and sentiments, is a true girl.

6. I Killed My Mother (2009)

Art is the greatest medium recreating aspects of life and channeling deep and untold thoughts. Art, above anything else, is a personal matter. Xavier Dolan’s work, in its sincerity and promptness, effortlessly prove this fact. Fresh as youth and mature as wisdom, his first feature film is a sweet lament about the blinding dawn of manhood.

Embodied by Dolan, Hubert is a middle-class teenage boy living with his eccentric mother. He is a quite mature young man, self-aware and sexually stable. However, there’s something he can’t understand: his mother. As a little boy, Hubert was very attached to Chantale. But what about that homosexual, stubborn man rising inside him? Why can’t he accept the beloved mother of his happy childhood?

“What would you do if I died today,” Hubert asks. “I’d die tomorrow,” Chantale answers while her son is already gone. At the age of 20, Dolan creates his first Freudian study of sexuality in cinematic form. The Canadian enfant terrible knew that love can tear us apart and even had the talent to make a film out of it. In this semi-autobiographical piece, he gives one of the greatest sex scenes of all-time.

What makes a movie an all-time classic? Which is the magic ingredient that protects a motion picture from the time’s dust? It could be its verity toward the culture of a space-time setting, its sentimental originality, even its timeless impact on art and collective moral sense.

Perhaps there’s something more than that in the movie classics we’ve all loved— something of a more complex nature that speaks directly to the heart and is difficult to be defined. Stanley Kubrick’s mental torment of “A Clockwork Orange” generates an elusive yet aching scratch in the brain, whereas the social degradation portrayed in “American Beauty” occupies a cell of painful pleasure in one’s heart, glaring sadly in its stunning cloth.

But sometimes, what is a classic for us, providing a good company in a cold night from time to time and reflecting our culture’s worsts and bests, it’s a distant artifact for others. Correspondingly, films like India’s “Pather Panchali” and Japan’s “Harakiri” comprise towering watersheds in the cinema history of remote lands. Let’s make an overview of some great movie classics of others that may impress every film lover.

10. The Life of Oharu (1952)

One of the great pieces occurring in the prolific post-war era in Japan, “The Life of Oharu” is a pitch-black social drama that describes the suffering life of an ordinary 17th-century woman. Perhaps Kenji Mizoguchi’s most mature cinematic fruit, this is a story of a thick bitter taste that has no moments of sweetness to offer.

Being defined by the female textures that both fascinate and disturb, Oharu was boosted toward a downturned path since her teenage years. Confined, mistreated and sold, she gifted the miracle of life that springs from a woman’s body, and then served the self-insulting occupation of a prostitute until the complete fading of her allures.

The story of Oharu finds its flesh and bones in a distant past that is dressed in strict and flowery traditions, still reflecting an eternal aspect of every society on its overmodest yet deeply immoral hard core. A substantially feminist work that was created during a quite demanding era in relation to the societal treatment of women, this is a film firmly landed on a universal bedrock of humanitarianism.

9. The Soft Skin (1964)

Eternally fresh, breathtakingly elegant and idealistically complex, the “French New Wave” expresses the groundbreaking beauty of another era and the heart of a desperado all the same. Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, the two pioneering artists who epitomize the most influential French film movement, have created a great number of films that even nowadays have lost none of their power.

More accessible than Godard’s pictures, structurally and sentimentally speaking, Truffaut’s works sustain a free-wheeling spirit as well. His early poetic romance “The Soft Skin” is one of his best stories, oozing a sense of confidence, so in relation to its heroes’ intentions as in relation to its quintessential placement.

Conventional life, esoteric liberation of norms, and various aspects of self-indulgence are discussed in this all-time contemporary film by the legendary French auteur. His notorious first feature “The 400 Blows” is a down-to-earth biopic work. His “Jules and Jim” is a stunning postcard of an old-school true romance. In this case, the characters portrayed are less polished, even less dramatic, mapping one of Truffaut’s most pragmatic topical landscapes.

8. Withnail & I (1987)

Considered a cult classic, the British film “Withnail & I” is an unheard gem that gloriously succeeds in being socially caustic and humorous. It occurred during the late 80s and refers to the late 60s, emitting a sad charm of both these iconic decades. If you’ve never watched this slice of bittersweet life in England, it may be a surprising cult experience of funny moments and sad introspections.

The story follows two unemployed actors who face difficulties in adopting conventional lifestyles in different ways. The year 1969 finds both of them sunken in bad habits, until they decide to carry out a common self-seeking trip in the British countryside. Adding insult to injury, the new provincial environment has in store quite different oddities than the circumstances of serenity our heroes expect.

British filmmaker Bruce Robinson has synthesized a well-balanced film that stands at an equal distance between comedy and real-life drama, as it returns to the fading glory of a golden era’s overtone. “Withnail & I” generates a permanent mood of nostalgia, providing a profound character study at the same time. Mostly addressed to British people, it still comprises a sensitive comedy for every movie buff.

7. Gertrud (1964)

Always religiously oriented, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s directorial filmography is numerically limited and technically intelligent. No doubt, the almost motionless spiritual torment of “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” as narrated through a series of Maria Falconetti’s close-ups, comprises his greatest masterpiece. However, his late-career fruit “Gertrud” is another female character profiling that deserves a cinephile’s attention.

Almost ten years after the release of “Ordet,” a hardcore Christian praise, Dreyer made “Gertrud,” a much more realistically fabricated story that accepts and explores the carnal nature of its humane characters. It is developed around a married woman whose deepest longing is the conquest of the one life-lasting true love.

On the Danish director’s static and monochrome frame, we see a promptly delivered and rationally sculpted psyche‒ a transparent psyche reflecting various diachronic necessities of the tangible women that used to exist in the years of oblivion and still exist in our modern cities. As in the case of “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” here religion is placed in the thematic landscape of the story as an inner ingredient of psychological nature.

6. The Ascent (1977)

Wife of Elem Klimov until her premature demise, Larisa Shepitko was a female film director that we should never forget. Here, we talk about the piece which stands out of her filmography: An unbearable journey into the deepest sanctums of a both esoteric and cosmic labyrinth, “The Ascent” is a Soviet classic that is respectfully attached to its setting, understanding the involved people and unfolding circumstances.

Snow-capped and hostile, a German-occupied rural area of Belarus holds the land where two Soviet partisans were meant to carry out a common journey that would reveal two quite different destinations for each of them. As moving forward in a desert of nature and souls, Sontikov and Rybak essentially came up against with one another and with their own selves.

Directed with technical accuracy which effortlessly delivers the sentimental maelstrom of the story’s underground foundation, “The Ascent” is a poetic interpretation of an embattled situation, so in relation to its collective impacts as in relation to a personal reflection of every participant. During the pursuit of a shelter, the two main heroes find out that the real war happens inside a human heart and the roughest enemy is always our self.

It’s the numbing effect of alcohol on mind; It’s Jim Morrison’s poetry and Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinema. We call this sense “psychedelia”‒a sense that represents our mental state as we attempt to experience an awakened dream. Such a transcendental act of conscience has been yearned by our kind since its very first occurrence and through many different passages, material and incorporeal, that may offer a comforting disintegration of reality.

“This is the strangest life I’ve ever known,” Morrison once said. Indeed, life is as strange as we’re willing to experience it. Cinema, more than any other medium, has provided us with the means to carry out mental trips into the strangest and most psychedelic layers of life. Decomposing reality into its fundamental dust and bringing it back into a visual body of spinning colors and lights, Stanley Kubrick, Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Lynch and many other auteurs have illustrated a deformed yet substantial idol of our world.

In this case, let’s focus on some of the most psychedelic pieces of the seventh art that occurred during the idealistic and technological maelstrom of the 21st Century. Sit comfortably, grab a cigarette or a glass of whisky and don’t hesitate to enjoy their most elusive ingredients.

10. The Fall (2006)

Visually stunning and developed on an unconventional narrative path of striking moments, Tarsem Singh’s “The Fall” immediately occupies a permanent cell of memory in every viewer’s mind. Filmed in original settings of almost 30 countries, this is a delightful voyage in the earth’s mysteries and even, in the imaginative sentience of a child.

In a way, “The Fall” tells the story of Alexandria, an intelligent young girl who spends her days in the confined and miserable environment of a hospital. When she meets Roy, an injured movie stunt-man, he tells her of a freewheeling story that involves various different parts of human history. Like Alice fell into the rabbit hole, Alexandria fell onto the illusive ground of Roy’s adventure lands.

Inspired by a child’s colorful dream and dedicated to the both violent and escape-seeking aspirations of adulthood, this is a film to be experienced as a comeback to childhood, or as an observation of our kind’s haunting yet mundane meandering on its territories. In any of these cases, “The Fall” is a unique, secret glace in a heart dazed by sugar.

9. 2046 (2004)

Kar-Wai Wong’s search for love’s ingredients and points of frailty has always taken place on a dazzling surface of textured sentiments and trembling reality. Since his first study of love in the obscure substance of a hurt spirit, as it is portrayed in “Chungking Express,” the Chinese filmmaker changed the way we perceive romance.

His notorious “2046” comprises another study of erotic love that exceeds the limits of space and time, reaching a level of panhuman and timeless sentimental accuracy. It follows Zhou Mo Wan, a male science fiction writer, who mentally transports through time in order to claim lost chances of a lifetime and get in touch with beloved figures of the past. But is such an extravagant mental act enough to change history, or would humans eternally remain loyal to their inner substance?

In Kar-Wai Wong’s melancholic universe of cryptic illusions, “2046” occupies its own planet of a captivating, melodic and volatile idealistic soil. Is it a sad dream that swirls in a vain attempt to find love? Yes, perhaps it is. But before it brings you back here, it takes you to the stars.

8. Waking Life (2001)

From his observations on teenage life until his long-term studies on relationships and life itself as it smoothly evolves, Richard Linklater has always focused on various behavioral trends in a quite profound yet direct way. We’ve loved his realistic characters, either they are adolescents in a search for identity either they are adults who discover love.

Shinning like a breath of crystal-clear thoughts, “Waking Life” is perhaps the most existential work among Linklater’s numerous masterpieces. Taking place in a man’s dream, it effortlessly unfolds on a palpable aspect of both subconscious and actuality. Until the end, you’ll have probably forgotten that this is something else than your own, deepest dream.

Essentially, “Waking Life” comprises a psychological study, suggesting that if one dives into his mental object through the cerebral canals that we call “dreams,” they will finally perceive reality, including other people and their own selves, in its wholeness. Being absolutely inspiring, entertaining and educational at the same time, this is one of the best psychedelic cinematic experiences you could ever have.

7. A Field in England (2013)

Ben Wheatley’s 2013 curio of “A Field in England,” more than any other picture, expands the topical landscape of period films. Interlacing a thread of history, a thread of existentialism and a thread of nightmarish insobriety, it falls in a claustrophobic eternality of its own.

During the English Civil War of the 17th Century, three recreants leave the battlefield so as to search for a free life into the wild. Stricken by a blood-stained fate, their group meets a magician who coerces them to assist his quest for an underground treasure. In the course of this task, the three men cross a field of mushrooms which seems to host a first desired meal table. Since this circumstance, however, they seem to be trapped in a rampant energy web of evil forces.

On a volatile black-and-white canvas of visual motion and mental delirium, Wheatley’s audacious cinematic sedation irritates a quite dark nerve of perception, as it compares two major aspects of horror on the circle of a nightmare. Being heavily demanding, as regards one’s aesthetic and rational senses, “A Field in England” is a tantalizing psychedelic adventure in the absurd.

6. Samsara (2011)

Appearing as the 21st Century’s equivalent of “Koyaanisqatsi,” Ron Fricke’s “Samsara” is an ode to the senses. During its hovering over a colorful, polymorphic and melodic world, this absolutely stunning motion picture glorifies the beauty that we see, touch, smell, and even find inside us.

Moving from the most pristine grounds of nature to the most structured urban complexes, “Samsara” breathlessly navigates us in the wonders of a continuously evolving space-time continuum. As its title suggest, this film respectfully projects the natural ability of growth and renaissance in the magic of its frame and flow.

Obviously inspired by Buddhist philosophy, this is a documentary that achieves to trigger skepticism and introspection, while it provides a stimulating sensual experience that could satisfy even the fussiest taste. On a thin cosmic corner where nature, culture, and philosophy meet, we find “Samsara,” glowing on its stunning portrait and streaming in its intoxicating aura.

It was back then, centuries ago, when the invention of camera obscura would completely change the way we record the past, recreate memory and observe the detail of a fleeting moment. This premature occurrence of a static recording medium signified a very first subtle step into the idols of a man-made mirror of life: cinema.

The first movie ever made was a one-minute-long gallop of a horse that was created as a combination of 24 photographs by Eadweard Muybridge. This silent illusion of movement became a sudden boost that led on to the flourishing era of silent cinema, which once and for all changed the art of drama and used to fascinate the viewers all around the world since the early 1910s until the late 1920s.

Perhaps nowadays the scratched image, overdramatic body language and muted expression of the silent films seem obsolete and distant, as the developed technological means have provided absolutely realistic motion pictures. However, our “Little Tramp” will never die and his city’s lights will never fade away; “Nosferatu” will always remain scary in his pale skin and expressionist environment. Even, Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” will possibly never stop appearing futuristic and otherworldly even in the next centuries.

Cinema is the art of immortalizing the past and enlivening the inside of a human heart. Cinema is both a reflection of reality and idea, and that’s why it’s the most complex and romantic form of art. You can’t be a movie buff without being nostalgic of a slightly colored past. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, F.W. Murnau, Sergei Eisenstein and all the others comprise the glorious past of today’s cinema. We can’t forget them.

Commonly, the silent films were short in comparison to the “talkies,” lasting from some minutes to more than an hour. In this list, we are reporting 10 of the longest, most thematically complete and technically impressive silent works. They’re pretty old yet timelessly precious, and despite what they say, life is long enough…

10. Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922)

Fritz Lang is one of the most notorious European directors of both silent and sound films. He took action in Germany and America, being a sign of the German Expressionism and a contributor to Hollywood’s golden age. From his early German pictures to his Twentieth Century-Fox productions, Lang was always focused on existential issues, frequently developing them on crime cases that were heavily bathed in a noir-ish mood.

His 1922 “Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler” occurred during his early period of filmmaking, foreshadowing his forthcoming long career of breathtaking mysteries and existential expositions. Ostensibly an old-school gangster story, this extended two-part film follows a manipulative mobster who distracts great amounts of money from naïve bourgeoisie members, until he meets an intelligent and determined police inspector.

Unconventional in relation to its narrative structure and visually captivating, “Dr. Mabuse” exhibits an unfading thoroughness which emerges all along on the plot’s growth. Simultaneously suspenseful and character-driven, this is a film to enjoy, consider, and finally experience to the fullest through its deep psychological profiling and daring social breakthroughs.

9. Les Vampires (1915)

Louis Feuillade’s 1915 epic “Les Vampires” comprises a study of cinema’s functions, which occurs on an illusionary contrast between realism and surrealism. Developed throughout the time-span of ten episodes, this is an intelligent film of exceptional apprehension in relation to its remote present and its blurry future.

The mini-series of “Les Vampires” essentially tells the story of an underworld sect, as its members are chased by a journalist who’s determined to uncover their criminal activity. Self-called “vampires” the film’s greedy heroes are in a way terrifying creatures that suck blood from their victim’s fragile veins‒ not in the exact way we see at first, but in the mundane way their society describes.

In this case, Feuillade achieves two significant objectives: he provides a dark-shaded portrait of an eternal society and he explores the dynamics of interpretation and its substantial relationship with reality. Creating this piece during the very early period of the 20th century, the French auteur engages true cinema in a profound and fascinating form. “Les Vampires” is highly recommended to be watched like one episode per day.

8. The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

Written by Douglas Fairbanks and directed by Raoul Walsh, “The Thief of Bagdad” is a silent visual orgy of a fairytale. More than 90 years since its release, this film still comprises a feast for the eyes. Its immortal, somewhat adolescent grace was carefully weaved on a tapestry of extravagant visual effects and eccentric folklore myths.

There’s a kingdom, a desirable princess and a poor handsome buccaneer. There’s also a common enemy. This is a fairytale like the ones we were told during a cloud-weighted childhood. “Happiness Must Be Earned,” is the film’s quote. And indeed, this is what parents want for their children. In its child-like naivety, yet, this picture reflects the unspoiled heart of a true child.

Perhaps it steers clear from the multifaceted, sometimes illegible truths we seek in the art of cinema, but this silent masterpiece is defined by an unfailing, even inconceivable technical construction, considering its era. Stylistically glorious and thematically insouciant, “The Thief of Bagdad” delivers the beauty of its texture and the evasion of its flexures.

7. The Big Parade (1925)

A very organic, detailed and bold projection of the state of war, “The Big Parade” by American director King Vidor arguably has inspired various anti-war works of Hollywood. Split in two chapters, the story on a first level describes the initiation of a soldier in an active army, while during the second part it puts on the spot the bloodstained landscape of war, pulling the rag from under the viewer’s feet due to its compelling brutality.

The seedy life in the battlefront is purposefully contrasted with a melodramatically approached romance between the story’s protagonist and a simple woman. The most horrid human condition is compared to the optimum one. Haste, greed and sentimental deprivation are set against the most intense emotions of all: erotic love.

Meanwhile, a subtle alternation of pure drama, comedy and romance embraces the deep substance of war: The simultaneous co-living and clash of mere humans with different origins; the inevitable contrast between the taught sense of patriotism and the inherent panhuman instincts. Glaring on the acting and technical adequacy, the multidimensional reality of “The Big Parade” is focused on that strange creature that needs and hates war at the same time…

6. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)

Blooming like a flower that suddenly sprouted somewhere in between the ruins of World War I, the silent era grasped a lot of the case’s raw materials in order to dominate its thematic construction. In this framework, one of the best anti-war silent pieces is “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” by Irish filmmaker Rex Ingmar.

Ingmar’s patient tale of a big family’s course during the Great War observes the situation from many different standpoints, always focusing on the object of the human mind and its abilities to adopt positions and express its own esoteric maladies on the flaming flag of war.

The film’s thematic gravity center isn’t concentrated on the pragmatic consequences of the embattled circumstances‒ it’s more of a philosophic approach toward the behavioral trends of humans according to their tribal and geographic origins, as well as according to their inherent psychological qualities.

“The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” oozes a poetic misery that electrifies the charged wires of a deprived human heart in any case. War isn’t a sudden incident between national armies. War originates from an amalgamation of muted societal malfunctions which daily strike every man on many levels. War hushes art and sentiment until it recreates both of them in a body of fiery colors. And all these are said in a poem of flowing, subtle beauty.

Cinema sometimes is a shadow of thoughts carved in the pathway of its creator’s steps through life. Cinema is both science and magic. Cinema, in its purest form, is a reflection of beauty and ugliness into shapes and shades that stain one’s mind in their sincere illustration.

In Ingmar Bergman’s shattered subliminal terrors, we’ve loved cinema’s secret ingredient which flows in our trembling veins. On Andrei Tarkovsky’s hovering ghosts of memory, we’ve always loved cinema’s direct capability of mental interpretation. We are all movie buffs, at the end, and what keeps our minds stimulated is cinema’s highest purity as it occurs on visual moments of recorded human intelligence.

The cases of cinematic mastery captured in a scene’s exposition are numerous. This is just a selection of 10 scenes and sequences that showcase technical glory, visual beauty and substantial adequacy. Let’s enjoy them.

10. Memories of Murder (2003) – They’re watching in the rain

Based on real events that took place in South Korea in the time span of 1986-1991, Joon-ho Bong’s 2003 “Memories of Murder” tells the abominable story of a serial killer who always used the same eccentric techniques so as to abuse his female victims, as it was experienced and handled by the local community.

Obsessed with rainy days, red clothes and one specific pop song, the film’s dark criminal managed to create a vivid reflection of his character in his seekers’ eyes and remain under the shadow of his pitch-black intelligence all the same.

Bong’s cinematographically ravishing interpretation of a serial killer case deals with many issues, instead of strictly focusing on the mystery’s effect on the viewer. The film’s thematic center is rendered on a sickly social framework that strangles human liberty, as it also highlights the aspect of the investigators who are ethically and sentimentally involved in the case. A dispersed mood of climactic mystery dresses the story’s solid core as an embellishing cloth that doesn’t steal any of its substance.

In the most fascinating sequence of the picture, the detective team has prepared a well-studied ambush to the killer. The rain begins. A female detective wears a red dress and walks in the woods. Her colleagues wait in an observatory. The real victim, though, is all alone. She looks around…

Then, a phone rings. This sequence is masterfully synthesized, bringing out the killer’s unbeatable plan. We believe we can read his mind and then we find out we were trapped. In its unparalleled operation, this compilation of events represents an aspect of cinema’s skill to influence.

9. Enter the Void (2009) – Opening sequence

The loved and hated enfant terrible of “New French Extremity” has fearlessly dived into the muddy waters of a both real and elusive underworld, dragging up familiar, sometimes detestable figures that were sculpted by the hands of a relentless master. Gaspar Noé looks his miserable creatures directly in the eye, as he simultaneously exposes them at the day’s burning light and at his own love’s warmth.

Among his shocking, visually explicit and still deeply dramatic works, “Enter the Void” is defined by the most delicately existential texture. Its plot involves two American siblings, a male drug user and a female stripper, who carry their sorrowful minds in the cosmic maelstrom of modern Tokyo. Oscar narrates the story through the delirious cerebral paths of his drugged mind until he finds a way to hover over his former existential void of wounds and griefs.

The notorious opening sequence of the film introduces us to a world of persistent flashing lights that encircle a gloomy territory of tarnished souls. Oscar is the point of observation, as his eyes seem to film his balcony’s view during the usual routine of getting high. His perspective provides an imagery as psychedelic as sadly deforming, directly delivering the hero’s mental state and engaging the viewer to the story’s psychological landscape. Intoxicating and depressing at the same time, this is one of Noé’s greatest cinematic moments.

8. Dreams (1990) – Kurosawa walks on a Van Gogh’s painting

One of cinema’s greatest possibilities is the depiction of that fleeting breath of hidden thoughts that we call “dreams.” We admired this ability on Andrei Tarkovsky’s oneiric mirrors. Then, we experienced its chilly effect in David Lynch’s surreal dream world. In Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 “Yume,” more directly than ever, we saw his own nocturnal voyages in a land of childhood idols and adulthood terrors.

From his days of puerility until his years of conscious maturity, the Japanese auteur experiences a meandering in his most beloved places and in the most dystopian infernos of an almost collapsed real world. Every viewer of this film makes a plunge in Kurosawa’s conscience, which is generously drawn on a canvas of bewildering visual beauty and contextual profoundness.

Perhaps the most striking part of the film involves a dream of Kurosawa about Vincent Van Gogh’s art: He carefully looks at a painting in a museum and suddenly, the depicted landscape absorbs him.

Accompanied by Fredric Chopin’s engaging music, Kurosawa walks on the painting’s textured alleys of mixed color, until the entire landscape becomes real. Kurosawa follows Van Gogh in the territories that hosted and inspired him, and eventually reflected his artwork. This is one of the greatest co-existences of two legendary artists in the cinematic universe.

7. Bicycle Thieves (1948) – Antonio’s attempt to steal the bicycle

One of the most representative pieces of the Italian Neorealist Movement and diachronically one of the best pieces of the seventh art generally, Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” captures the quintessential morbidity of the societal circumstances in post-war Italy, in its sincere simplicity. As if letting all of the parameters flow in a naturalistic circular course, De Sica sheds some light on a realistic figure that could have suffered in a similar way uncountable time.

This time, it was Antonio. He just needed a job so as to provide food and shelter to his little boy. His attempts were many and the offers were few, while his son’s needs were daily intensified. Finally, a job would be offered him, as long as he owns a bicycle. And yes, he owns a bicycle, until it’s stolen. What is he supposed to do now? How can he claim a weapon to survive? Why should his fate be so relentless?

Existing in the small void of space that lies between struggle and pauperism, Antonio can’t find an honest way to save his family. He has to steal a bicycle. In the wrecked structure of his city, perhaps a bicycle is more valuable than human life. He doesn’t mean to harm anyone. He despises the act his hands are about to commit, but he just has to live. In these few moments before Antonio grabs the bicycle, we observe a desperate dance of an ignored, unfairly impoverished human being.

6. Vertigo (1958) – The revelation of Madeleine Elster

Lying among Alfred Hitchcock’s best works, the 1958 American classic “Vertigo” is a skillfully composed symphony of charged moments. The maestro of thriller-mystery film genre really knows how to prove that mundanity creates illusion and illusion reflects mundanity all the same on the deceiving glass which stands between them. James Stewart as Scottie Ferguson is Hitchcock’s quintessential character and Judy Barton is just a woman disguised in his dream’s lace.

Scottie is a man of both fragile body and mind. He suffers from fear and pain. He even bears an insistent feeling of loneliness. When a woman called Madeleine Elster is introduced to him, he beholds his dream in flesh and bones. Dressed in expensive fabric and embellished by her shiny blonde hair, Madeleine is just a retouched image of a less glowing woman. Eventually, Scottie finds out he was trapped, but he’s not ready to let his dream disappear in the abyss of nonexistence.

The meeting of Scottie and Madeleine takes place during one of the most iconic shot sequences in cinema history. Indeed, the combination of camera movement, perspective, color synthesis, and body movement provides a very well-crafted scene that accurately serves the film’s contextual framework.

Scottie stands at the bar. Madeleine is found somewhere among other people in the background, but her figure is dressed in green while the walls have a bright red color. She walks toward Scottie while following coordinated moves, their eyes cross. Then, she moves back again. Before she exits the room, her figure is reflected in a mirror…

As the years go by, cars lose their curves, records lose their scratchy sound and homes lose their lace. Times change and so do we‒ all at one with our cultures, our aesthetics, our fashions. Change is a need. It’s an unstoppable force, maybe, but it doesn’t erase memory in its sweeping establishment.

On the detailed façade of an old building, in the faded pages of an old book and in the black-and-white frames of an old film we always seek the nostalgic reflection of a dusty past. Capturing all of the beauty and the wistful atmosphere of the 60s in France, “la Nouvelle Vague” carries an indestructible photograph of its truth.

Cinephiles love it, and so do artists and filmmakers. It has influenced the seventh art in an unlimited degree, as in relation to time and space so in relation to content and aesthetics. From the Danish Dogme 95 to New Hollywood, and from the idealistic revolution to the shooting innovation, the artistic impact of France’s iconic cinema of the 60s is catholically deep and essential.

Let’s stare at the beauty of the French New Wave through the films that mirror its visual style and character.

10. Chinatown (1974)

One of Roman Polanski’s best pictures and perhaps the most iconic neo-noir film, “Chinatown” definitely falls into a terrain of sad beauty and disguised corruption that François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard originally carved in a different soil. Set at the 1940s in America, it showcases a noteworthy authenticity of the era’s both charm and morbidity.

Polanski’s point of observation here is different than the one usually provided by the French New Wave auteurs, as they always follow the outlaw and he follows the external force that means to explore the shady waters of the story’s substance. In a more “American” style of narration and exposition, Chinatown reveals one of the most masterfully handled plot twist in cinema history, and still sustains a much more subtle ingredient of sorrow.

It involves a doleful, ultra-stylized woman. It contains guns, hats and officers. Of course, it’s quite known that the French New Wave has influenced the American crime cinema. But “Chinatown” lies on a silent desert of moral and emotional voids, in its effective and unforgettable beauty. Does its final shot remind you of something?

9. The Artist (2011)

French director Michel Hazanavicius has been charmed and inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s work and political placement. It’s true that every artist has inspirational idols and Hazanavicius has extensively talked about his own, while he’s also filmed a picture about Godard, based on an Anne Wiazemsky’s novel that focuses on her experiences with the legendary director during their marriage.

His notorious, Oscar-winner “The Artist” goes back in the early silent era of Hollywood, attributing homage to its occurrence and fearlessly exposing its delirium. On its retro canvas we see the styles of the 30s. We see an America of dreams and reckless hopes. We see Charlie Chaplin, smiling somewhere behind a red curtain. Still, in its stunning frames and filmmaking artistic features we see France and the innovation brought by its old and eternal “Nouvelle Vague.”

“The Artist” is a self-indulgent, absolutely stunning and victorious trip through time and ambition. It doesn’t reveal the existential vanity and the fatal destruction of the French New Wave. However, it keeps the same undimmed love for filmmaking and filmmakers, as it sustains a glaring retro beauty which emerges in its dedication to the past.

8. Samson & Delilah (2009)

Perhaps music is the most easily spread form of art, instantly transcending cultures and sentiments all over the world. Cinema, in its audiovisual nature, fulfills this task all the same, proving that ideas and emotions are absolutely universal and timeless values. Australian director Warwick Thornton drops a glimpse of Europe and maintains a grain of universality in the raw beauty of his 2009 piece “Samson & Delilah.”

Landing on his territory, Thornton draws the lines of the existential meandering of two young, disoriented youths that search for an identity in the city, after leaving the countryside of the vast and chaotically diverse land that it is Australia. Escaping from the evasive cell that encloses a jungle-like community, the story’s hopeless Samson and Delilah are thrown in a relentless game of survival in a both bigger and harder societal jungle.

Obviously remote of France’s cinematic new wave, so in relation to time as in relation to space, “Samson & Delilah” as a piece of the seventh art simulates its shooting techniques and its revolutionary spirit. In the footsteps of a creature lost in eternity and in need of change, this film is a hidden gem that utilizes the beauty of the European cinema in a way quite genuine and otherworldly.

7. A Coffee in Berlin (2012)

The hipster film “A Coffee in Berlin,” in its tragicomic nightmare and pleasant simplicity, is a gorgeous picture that loves the French New Wave. Niko Fischer, the moonstruck university student that stars the film, isn’t chased by police or by a troubled past. Yet, he’s lost in a life of blurred edges and in a city of a both enchanting and demanding image.

Shot in black-and-white and captured in a high contrast, the stunning moving frame of this film follows the story of a boy and a city. In this case, the city isn’t Paris and Niko hasn’t a lot in common with Jean-Paul Belmondo, but he’s silently thoughtful, and his girlfriend has got the short haircut, the full lips and the stripped clothes of Michel’s Patricia.

In the witty, quite topical criticism that emerges in the 2012 “A Coffee in Berlin” you can’t see the pure drama that you see in almost every piece of the French New Wave. Still, in the streets of modern Berlin you can see the vintage streets of Paris, as you can see the swirling reflection of its chased heroes.

6. Lost in Translation (2003)

In the French New Wave’s idealistic territories, romance is always a tragedy. A man and a woman most of the times meet so as to unsettle each other‒ unwillingly but effectively. In Sofia Coppola’s iconic “Lost in Translation,” which essentially deals with matters as loneliness and repressed sentimentality, we approach a similar tragedy from a different point of view yet in a similar existential trap.

Moving slowly through time and following loose lines of narration, “Lost in Translation” is more about what isn’t said and isn’t exposed than about what it offers visually. The sadly lighted landscape of a culturally and linguistically distant Tokyo operates as a straying canvas that leaves the two heroes in a suspended loneliness which mocks their tensed yet utopian connection.

Despite its modern aesthetics and its even more modern concerns, this film describes quite complex characters and ideas in a welter of silences and in a subtle nonexistence of decompressions, as the auteurs of the French New Wave have repeatedly done. Here, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are two Americans in Asia, but they effortlessly carry the sadness of Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jeanne Moreau, Anna Karina, and of all the others…

In life, style is what makes us unique. It’s something that we don’t necessarily need so as to survive, but we need it so as to express who we are. In the life of an artist, style plays an even more important role: It’s a signature, a personal visual language, a way of doing art and externalizing the art of an inner, restless culture.

In the case of the seventh art, style occurs as a resultant of various components. An auteur constructs the visual foundation of his work by choosing specific color pallets, camera kinesiology, music, dress codes, characters, expressive means, and many more. Let’s see some of the all-time best filmmakers, whose styles are distinctive, stunning, influential and yet inimitable.

10. Jim Jarmusch

No other filmmaker has ever described common characters, highlighting the beauty and the magic of routine, in the simplistic, thorough and charming way of Jim Jarmusch. Known as “the founding father of indie cinema,” Jarmusch established his style in his very first feature film of 1984 “Stranger Than Paradise,” being artistically consistent and idealistically unspoiled ever since.

Absolutely character-driven and subtractive in relation to their narrative and expositional motifs, all of Jarmusch’s films so far represent paradoxical manifestations of the ordinary. His stories seem to roam aimlessly in the space-time continuum, and so do his heroes. Behind all of his delirious cinematic meanderings, though, emerges a shadow deeply humane in its blurred edged, attributing a both palpable and significant texture to his work.

As for his pictorial interpretations, Jarmusch always inserts specific cinematographic techniques, including essentially slow long takes and firm camera kinesiology, which in combination with minimalist dialogues and dominant use of music result in an unfailingly familiar, stylized and somehow nostalgic result. In vivid colors or in black-and-white contrasts, in such a frame we’ve met Jarmusch’s peculiar characters and their adventures.

9. Sergei Parajanov

Georgian-Armenian film director Sergei Parajanov spent a big part of his life chased, while his artwork largely remains in obscurity for the modern western world. Influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Eisenstein and Pier Paolo Pasolini, the great Soviet artist crafted a strictly genuine and personal visual poetry that differs from every other poetic cinematic creation ever made.

Parajanov’s first terrifying, dark and glaring “fleur du mal” bloomed in his 1964 film “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,” which stands for an escapist step from the terrain of socialist realism and a self-executed initiation in an one-of-a-kind surrealist art. Serving the sacred imperatives of a sentimental esotericism, Parajanov created some of the most haunting and lyrical pieces of the seventh art.

All of his expressive devices, from camera movement to framing and from color mixing to the use of sounds, aim to portray mental states instead of moving along the naturalistic, linear steps of time. His stories aren’t chains of happenings but emotional wires that constantly spin in an abyss of ideas, as in the case of “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,” or stay completely firm, as in the case of his 1969 “The Color of Pomegranates.” In any case of his cinematic dreams, you can see Sergei Parajanov and only him.

8. Wong Kar-Wai

A romantic sob, a silent lament for the unfulfilled and unsaturated love always echo in every layer of depth, from the surface and until the darkest ocean floor, in the landscape of Wong Kar-Wai’s cinematic universe. Always dark, always complicated yet simple, and always hushed yet melodic, his stories are ravishing, evolving around troubled and lonesome characters.

It’s in the European looks. It’s behind the black glasses. It’s below the low-key lighting. It’s in the repeating music themes. It definitely is in the day-dreaming. It’s Wong Kar-Wai’s style. Eternally surviving in memory, countless moments of visual and sentimental beauty occur in the filmography of the great Chinese auteur as simply as raindrops rifle small pathways on the wet glass of a window.

Although he has impressively evolved over the years, technically and contextually speaking, along a glorious artistic course, the heart of his ideas is found there, in the curious creatures of “Chungking Express.” Yes, he offered all those reds and shapes of his stunning piece “In the Mood for Love.” And yes, he showcased the melancholic intelligence of “2046.” Essentially, yet, nothing changed since 1994.

7. Lucrecia Martel

In her numerically limited filmography as yet, Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel has accomplished the manipulations of a master of puppets. Her hands hold long, strong ropes of indefinite quality that circumscribe shifting distances between her mind and her puppets: us. She’s not a surrealist; she’s rather a realist of a different hue for the eyes of those willing enough to cut the rope.

Martel always uses her protagonists as points of both observation and notional creation, starting from an external stimulus and heading toward an upside-down yet more than real manifestation of a circumstance that is covered by a cloth of indistinctiveness. If one means to follow her tracks, a complete embracement of an outward aspect is necessary.

From her first feature film “La Ciénaga” until her recent “Zama,” Martel has achieved four steady and audacious steps in the cinematic world, defining a highly calibrated artistic locus of her own. Her work doesn’t offer its holiest treasures to every viewer, but instead recompenses the perceptive spectators through its penetrative and genuine aspects.

6. Gaspar Noé

Gaspar Noé, perhaps the most famous representative director of the “New French Extremity” has stood out not only due to his tendencies to the extreme, but due to his quite distinctive cinematic style all the same. His films have always shocked and gather wide attention in relation to their visual synthesis at the same time.

Once you’ve watched one of Noé’s films, you’ll never break free from its subliminal imprint. That being said, there’s no choice: you either love or hate this persistent memory. He most of the times focuses on the beaten and the damned of this world from a both sympathetic and blatantly exposing point of view. His observations are raw, descriptive, and painful. His political criticism, as it emerges in the background of his stories, adds insults to injury instead of easing any pain.

As for the aesthetic parameters, Noé’s style supports the moral and emotional extravaganza of his work in the most direct and intense way. Unconventional narrative, rotating camera movement, and delirious pace are some of his emblematic techniques that essentially describe chaotic situations of disrupted minds and collapsed societies. Disturbing or not, Noé has always been honest and artistically innovative, ruling a mundane sphere of bewildered tragedy.

Every structure needs an outline. Every composition needs notes. Every fairytale needs a story.

A film is what we see: its frames, its motion, its colors, and its shadows. A film is also what we listen: its melodies, its noises, its moments of silence, and its voices. Yet, what would even a well-done motion picture be without a good script? Would it originate from a source of genuine ideas? Would it be addressed to someone?

This list features 10 of the best 2018 films, in relation to their elementary idealistic content, script symbology, contact with reality, and character development. All of the mentioned above parameters contribute to the occurrence of motion pictures of very high artistic quality and of priceless humanistic value all the same.

10. If Beale Street Could Talk

Based on the 1974 homonym novel by James Baldwin and directed by Oscar-winner Barry Jenkins, “If Beale Street Could Talk” effectively delivers the spirit of a 70s American society, as it honors love in its most palpable and sincere quality.

The story takes place in Harlem during the 1970’s, involving Tish and Alonzo, a long-standing couple in anticipation of their first child, whose life is disturbed after Alonso’s sudden arrest for rape. In order to prove her partner’s innocence, an undeterred Tish dares an unequal battle against her prejudiced community, calling to arms all of her inner forces and seeking help from the closest family members.

Apart from showcasing an outstanding directing virtuosity, which is reflected on the film’s imagery and stunning visual synthesis, Jenkins has achieved a remarkable script adaptation, capturing the atmosphere of a foregone ere in its wholeness and giving real flesh and bones to characters who existed and maybe still exist, fighting for their ignored treasures every day.

9. 3 Faces

It travels through time, it photographs the moment, and it patiently floats on a cosmic sea of toil as it stands still. The vast boat of circumstances and repressed souls of “3 Faces” is Jafar Panahi’s latest film.

Set in Iran of the present, it transparently visits the past but is always landed on this land’s troubled soils. The lines of “3 Faces” follow three Iranian women. All of them are actresses of different ages and all of them chase a both external and internal territory of serenity and reification of aspirations. These three symbolic women are found at different places of the same spinning wheel, moving with the same speed on the same endless round of an essentially unmovable vanity.

Deeply humanitarian, emotionally thorough and philosophical in its subtle move, this is one more film by Panahi dedicated to the people of Iran. Superbly written and defined by a both glaring and shadowy originality, “3 Faces” fairly won the Best Screenplay award at the Cannes film festival.

8. Blindspotting

Topical in relation to its social circumstances and intertemporal in relation to the textures of its main characters, Carlos López Estrada’s first feature film “Blindspotting” proudly occupies a place among the best written films of the year 2018.

In its simple terms of storytelling and on a mundane landscape of commonly occurring conditions, this is a motion picture that was made for the sake of a humble yet all-important truth, steering clear from pretenses and artifices of void bedazzlements. Estrada’s cinematic debut deeply concerns countless individuals of the western world, touching the hardest and softest spots of their minds.

“Blindspotting” is the story of Collin and Miles, two more than real characters, who have always been troubled and disoriented, essentially facing difficulties in holding to the only unspoiled value of their life: friendship. The bleak reality that glares its teeth behind these two men, and the both sleek and faded surface of their portrait renders to the film an unfailing bourn.

7. The Favourite

If one attempts an introspection of Yorgos Lanthimos’s career, from his lesser-known debut in the big screens “Kinetta” until the present, the occurrence of “The Favourite” is a surprise. Progressively improving his scripts and character profiling, Lanthimos has focused on manifestations of psychological dysfunctions which pertain to maladies of modern societies: alienation, parental manipulation, sexual complexes and more.

One the other hand, his most recent work “The Favourite” is a period piece that principally deals with issues of power, a timeless flaw of human nature. Maintaining the grotesque and the sexual character of his rest works, this is a film much different in tone and thematic approaches.

Paradoxically, even in this case the Greek filmmaker employs an assemblage of absurd ingredients that pulls the rag from under the viewer’s feet once again. The specific difference here is the formation of a very tense yet very stable triangle of three main female characters. Each one of them is masterfully written, developed and performed. Set in the middle of the 18th century England stage, this triangle loses none of its power as the story unfolds to balance exactly where its meant to settle.

6. The Rider

As closer to reality as possible, casting non-professionals who were tasked to deliver the substance of their real lives, Chloé Zhao creates a film about those people that are bound with the loads that kill them. Her 2018 “The Rider” is the story of Brady, a poor cowboy who wants to do nothing else than participating in rodeo battles, even after facing death.

Brady Jandreau embodies Brady Blackburn, a cowboy who lives in South Dakota with an indifferent father and a younger sister. Brady makes a living exclusively by local rodeo races. After getting seriously injured during a race, he can’t imagine himself away from his fatalist profession, even though life seems to occupy a much different territory than his own.

On this breakthrough which trespasses an unchangeable American south, Zhao exposes to the viewer the most authentic aspect of a real-life drama. Although the plot is based on the hero’s accident, its hard core is found in the dispersed drama of his entire existence. More than analyzing the consequences of an ineffable accident, the film exhaustively and insightfully describes the deadlock of a representative life in a representative environment.

Sometimes we like it, sometimes we don’t. Anyhow, we can’t avoid it: another circle has closed. Whether or not 2018 was a great temporal box for you, in its transient object, it’s gone forever. But the lights and shadows of this recently numbed sequence of seasons have been captured in the life-giving lenses of cinema, translated into unfading shapes, colors, ideas, and emotions.

2018 was a magnificent and prolific cinematic year. From the glorious names of Hollywood to uncompromising indie auteurs, and from Latin America to Europe, this year offered us various unforgettable pieces of the seventh art. Before we close this box of time and let it lie under the dust of eternity, let’s make an overview of its best films around the globe.

10. Climax

In his most recent cinematic endeavor, Gaspar Noé engages perhaps the most expressive, erotic, and intoxicating artistic language: dance. Submerged into a melodic and clammy spiritual abyss, where feelings of every quality are melted into the flow of an untamed and incessant motion, the fiery young creatures of “Climax” seem to have just jumped out of Noé’s both colorful and pitch-black fantasy.

They all are dancers, comprising a human mosaic of almost every nationality, sexual identity and obsessive trait. After a wearing three-day rehearsal in an abandoned school, they have a seemingly endless, lush party. A huge bowl of dark red sangria is placed in the middle of the party room.

As if being a simultaneously vital and poisonous blood of life, around this fluid core grows a crude tapestry of inherent energy, repressed emotions and eroded humane necessities. Our unhesitating, grotesque and juvenile vampires greedily suck this nectar of gods and demons, heading toward a spinning purgatory, or toward an inner place of blinding catharsis.

Always landed on the very same planet of ethical ambiguity and existential pain, Noé’s “Climax” is actually the first of his films that caresses the commonly projected psychic fabrics of his artwork, without irritating and unraveling their most tender textures. This is a matured, evolved Noé who gloriously remains faithful to his ideas and artistic purposes. On a stable and secure pallet of vivid colors and on a rotating landscape of inexhaustible sentimentalism, the film’s dazed universe balances between its creator’s terrors and this world’s void traps.

9. Daughter of Mine

The recent Italian film “Daughter of Mine” has been created by a female artist, and indeed, only a woman’s mind and soul could ever dwell upon such a purely and deeply female subject, as the one that is found in the hard core of this work. In her second feature film, Laura Bispuri focuses on the delicate topic of motherhood, using two different and always agonizing lenses.

Sardinia: a land disconnected, firm, and foundering. Tina survives on this land, meant to continue its generation and born to be a mother. But her body couldn’t obey its strict nature, whereas her soul sought a child of her own. Vittoria doesn’t look like her: neither physically nor mentally, despite Tina’s efforts to raise the young girl as a small part of herself and keep her safe and still as her next step on that hostile island. How could she ever hide her from the constant eye of the weak yet persistent organic mind that offered Vittoria flesh, bones, and nerves?

Bispuri’s maternal scream of a both egocentric and altruistic inherent force echoes toward two contrary directions: the one follows the steps of a nature that generously and ecstatically flows from us, while the other follows the footprints of a nature that returns into us, adamantly rooting in every grain of our perishable body. Captured in very well-crafted frames and glaring on the stunning yet pragmatic performances of the main characters, this is one of the best European films of 2018.

8. Burning

“Burning” is Chang-dong Lee’s return in theaters after his much-acclaimed and awarded 2010 drama “Poetry.” Eight years later, the South Korean filmmaker seems to sail in a different, more obscure and deeper sea of filmic symbols, synthesizing a new perplexed language of his own. Being a mystery for the eyes and an enigma for the mind, this film is another intensive study of the human conscious and subconscious, which proudly bears Lee’s signature.

The story’s ostensibly mystified plot moves along the fractional topography of a triangle of two significative characters and the vital mirror that lies between them. Jongsu is an introverted delivery boy that, after falling for a hard-to-explicate idea of a woman, takes on a handsome and wealthy competitor in love, who effortlessly scratches a well-hidden wound in Jongsu’s soul.

Although the gravity center of the film’s narrative construction seems to be rendered around the bizarre and effective presence of the female’s puzzle, the story’s dispersed yet compact substance is found in Jongsu’s reactions and adaptations, as well as in his reflections on his mythical enemy. In his unexplained riddles, as well as in his complex and all at once real and surreal heroes, Lee installs various purely mundane features.

Even the most indefinite and volatile materials that build the transparent spiritual castle of secrets that it is “Burning” describe nothing more than our fear to see, touch, and describe our idol in the eyes of a creature that inhabits our cerebral and carnal channels.

7. Capernaum

Life is the first abrupt and suspended state of mind and flesh for every creature ever faced this earth. Surrounded by the colorful silence of a sunset, enjoying the rich flavor of a hot meal, or losing your thoughts into the melodic labyrinths of music, you’re sure about this: life is beautiful. But life doesn’t find a start line at the same shiny and warm meadow of carnal existence for everyone. For some, life is an undesirable sensational gift; it’s just a chance in the chaotic and filthy streets of a tactile vision.

The ethically audacious cinematic endeavor by Lebanese actress and filmmaker Nadine Labaki makes an honest, bitter comment on the uncountable human lives that survive under commonly accepted yet criminal circumstances, deprived of almost every essential right and prospect. “Capharnaüm” is the story of Zain, a 12-year-old boy that bears the load of a life that is formed from endless moments of suffering.

Zain could be a common boy that you meet every day in the street. He is found in every city, even in Europe and America, dressed in rags and carrying his smutty little fortune during a vain periodic roaming. The difference maker in the case of this story, though, is that its underage unfortunate hero denies accepting his fruitless existence as a determinate and unvarying condition. He recognizes the injustice that his parents once created and still sustain. He may be another victim, but he claims justice.

In its both emotional and moral stiffness, “Capharnaüm” is a neorealist masterpiece that seems more than timely, lying somewhere beyond the limits of timelessness.

6. A Twelve-Year Night

Dictatorial statuses have plagued the globe to an extent that most of us ignore. Standing for the grimmest chapters of our world’s endless diary, dictatorships have occurred —striking uncountable innocents— even in places you wouldn’t imagine. In the hard-to-experience real nightmare of his film “La noche de 12 años,” Uruguayan director Álvaro Brechner describes the military dictatorship of his territory during the 60s and 70s.

Based on real events, the story begins when three revolutionists who were members of the Tupamaros National Liberation Movement of Uruguay are transferred from the legal prisons to a secret accommodation of inhuman incarceration. That very night of their sudden relocation was meant to last for twelve years, a continual period that had in store nothing more than carnal and mental torments.

Fusing fictional scenes with footage material and trembling somewhere between a raw reality and a retrogressing fantasy, “La noche de 12 años” is an unfolding historic testimony of a pitch-black human condition that sternly touches the roughest aspects of a victimized, deeply and irreparably deprived conscience.