Cinephile

A free Black man in New York is kidnapped and sold south, and has to survive twelve years without losing hold of who he was.

Two soldiers cross no man's land to call off an attack, filmed to look like one unbroken breath.

German schoolboys enlist cheering, and the war spends them like small change.

A suburban father detonates his own life at forty two, convinced the wreckage is more honest than the lawn.

A skinhead leaves prison determined to pull his younger brother out of the movement that made him.

A pianist pretending to be blind witnesses a murder he was never meant to see, and the lie starts charging interest.

Marathi theatre's first superstar draws a roaring crowd every night and cannot find one person to go home to.

A farmer who buried his violent past has to dig it back up when caste politics comes for his sons.

Hollywood learns to talk, and the silent era's stars discover the party was never being thrown for them.

A mathematician's genius and his delusions come from the same place, and he has to learn which one to stop listening to.

A man is mistaken for a millionaire over a soiled rug, and the case unravels into something nobody involved is qualified to solve.

A few outsiders notice the housing market is built on nothing, and bet everything that the rest of the world is wrong.

The 1993 Bombay blasts rebuilt from the police files, with nobody allowed to come out of it clean.

A smuggler, a fisherman and a journalist chase one stone through Sierra Leone's war, each for a different reason.

A teenager falls for a woman with blue hair and finds out that first love teaches you who you are by leaving.

A wealthy woman's corpse vanishes from the morgue, and her husband has an excellent reason to be terrified.

Freddie Mercury builds the biggest band in the world and spends the whole time looking for somewhere to belong.

Two ranch hands fall in love over one summer and spend twenty years pretending it was only that summer.

Across one Italian summer a seventeen year old learns what wanting someone costs, and decides it was worth the price.

A teenage forger outruns the FBI as a pilot, a doctor and a lawyer, mostly because nobody thinks to ask.

Two boys grow up in the same Rio favela, one picks up a camera and the other picks up a gun.

A gleeful young thug is caught and handed to a state programme that promises to cure him of the will to choose.

A Texas electrician diagnosed with HIV starts smuggling in the drugs his own government will not approve.

A man in a mask meets a man who wants nothing, and learns that order is far harder to defend than to break.

Gotham's protector comes back broken to face a city that has decided it no longer wants saving.

A young cinematographer who cannot sleep or stay in a relationship starts seeing an unhurried therapist in Goa, and the conversation goes further back than she expects.

A detective falls for his prime suspect, and the insomnia turns out to be the least of his problems.

A cop inside the mob and a mobster inside the police, each racing to find the other before being found.

A freed slave and a bounty hunter ride into a Mississippi plantation to buy back a wife, and settle a much larger bill.

Two astronomers find a comet headed for Earth and discover that being right is nothing like being heard.

Land, sea and air run on three different clocks while four hundred thousand men wait on a beach to go home.

A man pays to have an ex erased from his memory, then spends the procedure trying to hide her somewhere they will not look.

A laundromat owner mid audit learns she is the worst version of herself in every universe, which is exactly why she can save them.

A confession from his wife sends a doctor wandering New York for one night, into rooms he was never invited to.

An insomniac and a soap salesman start a club for men with nothing left to lose, and it does not stay a club.

A man of plain decency keeps stumbling through American history while waiting for the only person he ever wanted.

Three generations feud over the coal fields of Dhanbad, where revenge is inherited like property.

The sons take over the war their fathers started, armed with borrowed film dialogue and no memory of why it began.

A Black man meets his white girlfriend's parents for the weekend, and every polite smile is a warning he cannot prove.

A betrayed general is sold into the arena and fights his way back up toward the emperor who took everything.

The son who wanted no part of the family business turns out to be the best there has ever been at it.

A father builds the empire and a son hollows it out, told side by side across fifty years.

A wife disappears on the fifth anniversary, and the husband's face on television is doing him no favours.

Thirty years in the mob at the speed the mob actually moves, right up to the morning it stops being fun.

A janitor at MIT solves proofs nobody else can, and the hard part is getting him to want anything at all.

A Black pianist hires an Italian American bouncer to drive him through the 1962 South, and neither survives the trip unchanged.

Hamlet moved to Kashmir in 1995, where the missing outnumber the dead and revenge keeps its own body count.

A pickpocket is planted as a maid to help con an heiress, and every person in the house is running a different script.

A thief and the detective hunting him recognise each other completely, which is precisely the problem.

Alan Turing breaks the Enigma code, and the country he saved prosecutes him for who he is.

A thief who steals from dreams is hired to plant an idea instead, and loses track of how far down he has gone.

A Jewish cinema owner and a squad of Nazi hunters converge on the same Paris premiere with very different plans for the building.

A father leaves a dying Earth to find humanity another home, and pays for it in the one currency he cannot earn back.

Two neighbours work out that their spouses are having an affair, and decide they will not become the thing they are mourning.

A businessman has three hours with a lawyer to build an alibi, and each retelling of the night is worse than the last.

A hitman looks back on fifty years of loyalty and finds nobody left alive to tell the truth to.

An agent catches his fiancée's killer and lets him go, again and again, until it is unclear which of them is the monster.

A buffalo escapes the slaughterhouse and an entire village chases it into the night, shedding civilisation as it runs.

A failing clown in a city that has stopped pretending to care discovers that being seen is worth almost any price.

A widowed sister in law and the brother who shields her spend a lifetime honouring a vow nobody asked them to make.

A RAW operative hunts a mole while grieving the agent she loved, and the job keeps asking which loss counts.

Osage families sit on oil money in 1920s Oklahoma and start dying in ways the white men around them find very convenient.

A con man arrives at a Bengal estate to rob it and falls for the daughter of the house, which ruins both plans.

Mumbai's lunch delivery makes one mistake in a million, and two lonely strangers begin writing to each other.

A student in occupied Shanghai seduces a collaborator in order to kill him, and loses track of which part is the act.

An intelligence officer sent into the Sri Lankan civil war watches an assassination he can see coming and cannot stop.

Macbeth in the Mumbai underworld, where two corrupt policemen do the work of the witches.

An astronaut left for dead on Mars decides to solve his way home, one problem at a time.

Two lives on the burning ghats of Banaras, both trying to outrun shame in a city built on endings.

A drifting veteran attaches himself to the leader of a new movement, and neither man can quite let the other go.

A man who can no longer make memories hunts his wife's killer using tattoos and notes he has no choice but to trust.

Two rural detectives chase Korea's first serial killer with no method, no science and no luck.

A grieving woman follows her boyfriend to a Swedish festival where the sun never sets and nothing is hidden.

An old trainer takes on the fighter he did not want, and they become the family neither of them had.

An ambitious engineer joins a plot to kill a blackmailer, and every conspirator is worse at this than they believe.

An amnesiac and an aspiring actress search Los Angeles for a name, inside a dream that eventually comes to collect.

Three childhood friends are pulled back together by a murder, thirty years after one of them got into the wrong car.

A welder takes two million dollars from a drug deal gone wrong, and something very patient starts walking after him.

A coal miner's son watches Sputnik cross the sky and decides he is going to build rockets instead.

Ten years after Troy falls, a king is still trying to sail home, and neither the sea nor the gods are in any hurry.

A man imprisoned for fifteen years without explanation is released and given five days to find out why.

The life of a British born terrorist, told without a single moment that asks you to understand him.

The man who built the bomb spends the rest of his life on trial for having a conscience about it.

A poor family talks its way into every job in a rich household, until the basement answers back.

An architect runs her whole life around a hypochondriac father, and a drive from Delhi to Kolkata puts the two of them in one car with the man behind the wheel.

A painter is hired to study a reluctant bride in secret, and being looked at that closely changes them both.

Two magicians destroy each other over a single trick, and the real cost is hidden where the audience never looks.

Two girls vanish on Thanksgiving, and one father decides he will do whatever the law will not.

Hitmen, a boxer and a briefcase, shuffled out of order until the ending lands somewhere in the middle.

A singer finally wins her mother's approval and finds that it does nothing about the voice in her head.

A teenager's affair with an older woman returns decades later as a war crimes trial and a secret she will not admit.

A trapper mauled and left for dead crawls across a frozen wilderness on nothing but the intention to settle it.

A boy is told great art needs great heartbreak, goes looking for some, and is given far more than he ordered.

Boxing clans fight over North Madras in the 1970s, where the ring is the one place caste can be settled fairly.

Eight men are sent across Normandy to pull one soldier out, and have to decide what that arithmetic is worth.

A Cuban refugee takes the Miami cocaine trade on appetite alone, and appetite is the only thing that ever beats him.

A profiteering industrialist hires Jewish workers for cheap labour and ends up spending everything he has to keep them alive.

Two detectives track a killer working his way through the deadly sins, and he is always several moves ahead.

A retired investigator writes a novel about the case he never closed, and the woman he never asked.

A rape conviction goes to appeal, and the film refuses to let either lawyer be entirely wrong.

A former militant becomes a lawyer defending the terror accused, and is shot for it at thirty two.

A banker serving life for a murder he did not commit spends twenty years being remarkably patient about it.

A writer takes a winter caretaking job at an empty mountain hotel, and the hotel turns out to have its own plans for his family.

A marshal investigates a disappearance at an asylum for the criminally insane, and the island keeps rearranging the question.

A trainee agent bargains with one killer to catch another, and pays in pieces of herself.

A jazz teacher dies on the day he finally gets his break, and has to argue his way back into a life he never noticed.

A NASA engineer comes home to collect his old nanny and finds a village that will not let him leave unchanged.

A nobody sent to Italy to retrieve a rich man's son decides he would rather be him.

An agent is handed a war fought backwards through time and told not to understand it, only to feel it.

A Tamil Nadu officer spends years chasing a highway gang across state lines, built straight from the real case files.

An oil man and a preacher fight over the same California town, and only one of them believes in anything.

A mother rents three billboards to shame the police over her daughter's unsolved murder, and the town shames her back.

Edinburgh heroin addicts choose life over and over, keep choosing wrong, and do it all at speed.

A family guards a cursed god in the rain soaked Konkan, and greed keeps sending the sons back down the hole.

A boy expelled from boarding school is sent home to a father who has plans for him and no interest in him.

A New York jeweller rolls every bet into a bigger one and cannot stay still long enough to be saved.

A family on holiday meets a family exactly like them standing in the driveway, and the resemblance is the threat.

Five criminals meet in a police lineup, and the only witness left alive is the one telling the story.

A detective with a fear of heights follows the woman he was hired to watch, then sets about rebuilding her.

A gangster tells an encounter cop three stories, and each one moves the line between them.

A drummer and a conductor push each other well past cruelty, both certain that greatness is on the other side.

A stockbroker builds a fortune out of nothing but sales patter, and spends it faster than the law can count it.

Two teenagers and an older woman drive to a beach that may not exist, through a country the camera keeps noticing.

Four hundred and eighty eight days of a relationship, told out of order by the one who misread it.

A ballerina chasing perfection in Swan Lake starts losing the boundary between the role and herself.

Two friends from a small town chase police jobs for the dignity the uniform promises, and the road home turns out to be long.

A poet nobody will publish is finally celebrated, once the world has decided he is dead.