All volumes

Romantic Comedy — Volume 1The promise that has to be paid for

Five films that know exactly which rule they are touching: one honors it in full, one moves its center, one reverses its message while leaving the surface intact, one gives away the ending immediately and shifts the tension onto the cause, one lets a death into a comedy. The full map of what can be done with a convention.

Romantic Comedy — Volume 2Distance is always a fear

Fame, money, a screen, an ocean: they look like circumstances and always turn out to be fears. Five devices for governing what a viewer knows before the characters do, up to the limit case of two leads who barely share a scene and hold to the last.

Thriller — Volume 1The price of wanting to know

An interview through glass where every clue has a price, and the price is said out loud. A flawless investigation that only completes another man's drawing. A puzzle solved with an hour of film still to go. Five investigators, and for each of them a different rule about how much they are allowed to understand.

Thriller — Volume 2Genre as a costume

A haunted house, a ghost story, a robbery, a sealed island, a case full of money. Five costumes you can recognize from far off, and a domestic story under each of them. The disguise is not the final trick: it is the road by which the second story manages to arrive.

Crime — Volume 1Where the moral center moves

Two enemies at the same table, talking about what each of them is about to lose, and no shot tells you whose side to take. A heist narrated by the man who planned it. A diner at the start and another one at the close. Five films in which the order of the scenes is already a moral position.

Crime — Volume 2The machine comes out unscratched

A city, a neighborhood, a warehouse, a border, the head of a man that no longer holds anything. You can climb, lie to yourself, or stay decent: the machine comes out unscratched. One exit in the whole volume, and it runs through telling.

Drama — Volume 1Everything is decided in a look

A wife in a hallway, three men in a room, a door closing: an entire marriage decided in a few seconds and without a line of explanation. Five films built on what a person manages to bring into focus, from the juror who repeats a walk with a stopwatch to the man who no longer trusts his own eyes.

Drama — Volume 2What no place can assign you

A young man mops the floors of a university he never attended and solves, without signing it, a problem left on a blackboard. Five protagonists with no enemy to beat, who have to decide what to defend once everything else has been taken away from them.

Horror — Volume 1The house, sleep, the family

A bed moving on the floor above, a dog that will not cross a threshold, clocks all stopped at the same hour, a dessert that tastes wrong. Five films that turn the most familiar place hostile, with the patience of someone shutting one reasonable explanation at a time.

Horror — Volume 2The monster in full daylight

A sunny afternoon, a well-kept garden, a dozen guests each holding a small card: the sale is over in a few minutes and nobody raises their voice. Five films that move the attack to where the eye is not looking for it, and take away every possible explanation.

Science Fiction — Volume 1Standing in front of what we have built

A policeman hanging over a drop is pulled up by the target he had come to eliminate, and nobody is watching. Five films in which the thing being judged is not the object on screen but the person who wanted it, and in which the danger had been aboard since departure.

Science Fiction — Volume 2Enormous devices, tiny decisions

Twenty-three years of backed-up messages opened all at once, by a man who had been away a few hours. Five films that raise the biggest apparatus in the genre and then use it to present a domestic invoice: a father, a daughter, a watch left on a nightstand before leaving.

War — Volume 1When the glory is taken away

Five films strip war of glory, of meaning, of the consolation that used to make sense of the losses, then watch what a man does without them. One gives up even the battle and keeps only a route; another breaks into two pieces that never get sewn back together.

War — Volume 2The war seen from the wrong place

From the enemy's side, from the window of a man in hiding, from the office of someone whose profits depend on the war, from a beach where the only aim is to leave. Five positions from which nothing gets decided, and that is exactly why everything can be seen from there.

Adventure — Volume 1How an old form gets reloaded

A planet with two suns, a snake in the wrong place, a glass of water shivering, a ship put back under sail, an arena that stops being a show and turns into a market for power. Five films that redo old things with means nobody in their day could afford.

Adventure — Volume 2How much are you willing to believe

How much are you willing to believe. Five different answers, from the seriousness that never allows a wink in three hours to the skeptic brought inside the film and won over by its laughing at itself. And in none of the five does the deciding moment belong to the strongest.

Animation — Volume 1Adult material, fairy-tale tools

A bereavement, a fratricide, a memory going out, a talent that landed in the wrong creature. Five films that do not turn down the volume of their material: they entrust it to the song, to the comic sidekick, to the object that returns transformed, and let the instrument of entertainment carry the weight.

Animation — Volume 2Winning back your own size

A girl signs for a job and her employer wipes out nearly every letter of her name. From that day on she has a shift, a task and nothing else. Five stories in which what is yours gets won back by working, by taking care of somebody else, by remembering: never by winning a fight.

Biopic — Volume 1The borrowed form

A man turns to the camera and tries to sell us something. Another picks up the newspaper outside a suburban house, like an employee who has lost his job. Five lives cut into a genre that is not theirs, where the editing pronounces the sentence instead of the characters.

Biopic — Volume 2How much invention a real life will bear

An old man in an asylum confesses to a young priest a rivalry that historians reject, and the film does not try to pass it off as record. Five biographies that declare where they placed their invention: a date moved, a man put on the wrong side of a crisis, an entire subplot.

Comedy — Volume 1The misfit and the rules of the place

Two strangers get the wrong address and wreck a rug: it is the smallest wrong that could ever set off a mystery, and out of it come a kidnapping, a ransom placed in the wrong hands and three fake nihilists. Five protagonists who learn a rulebook or pay for it, and come out changed.

Comedy — Volume 2The laugh that lowers your guard

Chicago, the winter of 1929: two musicians without a booking see something they should not have seen, and ten minutes later they are boarding a train in heels and a wig. Five films that charge for the ticket in laughs and deliver something else: a European grief, a freedom, a man who had never chosen.

Historical — Volume 1The price of what you believe

A gladiator wins, lowers his blade and hurls the weapon toward the stands: they cut him down in seconds, and out of that gesture come a revolt and a line of crosses along a consular road. Four men pay in full for an idea; the fifth gets name, income and rank while believing in nothing.

Historical — Volume 2The largest means, spent on an ending

A castle stormed, and the din taken away: what is left is arrows, fire and music. Five films that spend four hours of theater time, armies of extras and authentic imperial halls to make a viewer feel the weight of something that is ending while they watch.

Western — Volume 1The frontier hero on trial

A marshal wins the duel, takes off his star and lets it fall in the dust in front of the people who had not come out to help him. Five films that keep every pleasure of the genre intact and use it to open proceedings against their own protagonist.

Western — Volume 2Five ways of taking leave of the West

A pig farmer ends up in the mud of his own pen, cannot get on his horse, and misses the can with his pistol. The trade of the gunfighter still exists: the body that practiced it and the world that called on it have stopped being in the same place.

Musical — Volume 1Why these people are singing

In a courtroom as gray as a page of crime reporting, a woman looks at the same room and sees it full of spotlights, and we see it with her. Out of that single decision come the satire of the film, its editing and its ending. Five different designs, each one settling everything else.

Musical — Volume 2A weight the form was not built for

A boy with the face of an angel starts a tender melody at the tables of an open-air beer garden; the others pick it up one at a time, and when the shot drops to the uniform the song turns out to be an anthem. Five films that ask the most festive form in cinema to carry what was never its business.

Sports — Volume 1The finish line moved

Three cars from the same team wait for each other so as to cross the line together, and the driver who had led for hours ends up second on a technicality. Five films that declare out loud, almost always before the race even starts, what they will count as a victory.

Sports — Volume 2The verdict is written off the field

A time, a score, the vote of a panel: the result is always there, and it arrives when the important thing has already been decided in an office, in a hospital room, in front of a camera. What an athlete is worth gets settled away from the field.

Sports — Volume 3Five uses of the same formula

The most codified genre cinema has, used in five different ways. Performed straight like a scale without a slip. Believed in all the way, with only the prize changed. Smiled at without ever being disrespected. Stripped of its promised pleasures one at a time. Doubled, until it produces an ending that single road could not contain.