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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.