Films to Seek Out

01What's Worth Your Time

Not every film worth seeing arrives with a poster campaign and a Friday release. The best discoveries tend to require a little effort — a trip to a repertory house, a determined search through a streaming library, or a tip from someone whose taste you trust. Consider this that tip.

For British cinema, Andrea Arnold's American Honey (2016) remains one of the most viscerally alive road films made by anyone, anywhere. Shot on 16mm in a near-square Academy ratio, it gives its drifting, dispossessed American characters the same unflinching attention Arnold trained on Essex in Fish Tank. It was a Jury Prize winner at Cannes and is still undervalued. Seek it out.

Older and stranger: Bill Douglas's autobiographical trilogy — My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973), My Way Home (1978) — is among the most rigorous and quietly devastating work in British film history. The BFI holds the restorations; if your local repertory house programmes it, go without hesitation.

For something entirely different, Patrick Keiller's London (1994) and its successor Robinson in Space (1997) use a fictional narrator and real documentary footage to read the English landscape as political text. Meditative, witty, enraging — unlike anything else on a British screen before or since.

From world cinema, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car (Japan, 2021) is one of the most rewarding long films in recent memory — three hours that earn every minute, built around Chekhov, grief and the strange intimacy of a moving vehicle. It won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2022 and deserves the largest screen you can find it on.

Closer to home, Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire (France, 2019) is a film about looking — at art, at another person, at the cost of desire — that repays repeated viewing and is increasingly taught as a masterwork of contemporary European cinema.

All of these reward patience. None of them are difficult in any hostile sense; they simply ask you to show up with a little attention to spare — which is precisely what a cinema seat is for.