
Parasite
The first film not in English to win Best Picture: Bong turned class rage into something so entertaining that the whole world watched it and then argued about what it meant.

The first film not in English to win Best Picture: Bong turned class rage into something so entertaining that the whole world watched it and then argued about what it meant.

The film that got the internet age right before anyone else did: Sorkin's dialogue moves faster than you can follow, and the loneliness underneath it has only aged better.

Proof that a summer blockbuster can be genuinely difficult: Nolan stacked four levels of dream on top of each other and audiences argued about the last shot for years.

Subtitled a short film, and the story runs in order across one day. The interludes are voicemails from his parents asking where the van is.

Sciamma made a love story with almost no men in it and built the entire thing out of glances, firelight and the things two people decline to say.

Nobody had tried this before: Linklater filmed the same cast a few days a year for twelve years, so you watch a real child turn into a real adult.

The first Iranian film to win the foreign language Oscar: Farhadi built a moral maze where every person is partly right, and you will change sides several times.

One life told in three chapters by three different actors, and shot in blues and purples so tender the film almost hums: nothing about it looks like anything else.

The first Best Picture from a Black director, and the least evasive film ever made about American slavery: McQueen holds shots long past comfort and refuses to look away.

Days before it came out, Ocean published an open letter about falling in love with a man, and then let the record speak.

Shot in nineteen days on three million dollars, and cut like a thriller: a drummer, a teacher who throws chairs, and the question of what greatness costs.

The third film is the one that hurts: Linklater and his two actors let nine more years pass, then take it somewhere the first two politely refused to go.

Oppenheimer asked the men who carried out Indonesia's mass killings to restage them as movie scenes, and they agreed gladly: no documentary has ever been braver or harder to sit through.

It won the Palme d'Or and audiences walked out of it: Malick set a 1950s Texas boyhood against the formation of the universe and left the connections to you.

Sounwave and THC build the first half, Terrace Martin the second, and MC Eiht walks in from Compton's own past.

Hit-Boy's beat, a Blades of Glory sample, and twelve straight encores of it one night in Paris.

Gerwig's first solo film became the best reviewed of its year: a Sacramento teenager and her mother fight about everything, and the film refuses to take a side.

Rodgers' guitar, Pharrell's vocal, Nathan East on bass, and disco walked back onto the radio wearing robot helmets.

DJ Dahi slowed Beach House's guitar intro and ran it backwards, and Jay Rock's verse steals the whole record.