All volumes

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.