100 Best Movies on Kanopy Right Now

Little England is one of those rare cases in small-nation cinemas, where a film was equally appealing to mainstream and arthouse audiences. Upon its release, it was box office success and 2013’s Oscar submission for Best International Feature. Festival darling Pantelis Voulgaris equipped this interwar romantic drama with the attributes of an epic: it’s two hours and a half long, spans across decades, and is based on a novel of a notable size. Written by renowned author Ioanna Karystiani, who is also Voulgaris’s wife, “Little England” the novel was adapted in a riveting screenplay where love, jealousy, passion, and betrayal sizzle in a dangerous mix. As any good period drama, the emotional range is high, and the beauty in the premise—forbidden love—is a gift that keeps on giving. The film features two stellar lead performances, as Pinelopi Tsilika and Sofia Kokkali make their acting debuts as the two sisters, the latter being the face of a new, even more daring phase of Greek cinema today. 

Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay both won Berlinale Best Actress and Best Actor for this movie. They play a couple who are only a few days away from their 45th marriage anniversary when they learn that the remains of the husband’s first lover have been found. He then starts obsessing about his previous relationship, to the extent that when the day of the anniversary comes, there might not be a marriage left to celebrate. This is a very ‘adult’ movie – it’s quiet, sometimes slow, very well-executed, and overall a fascinating look at marriage.

If you’ve never heard of Sonia Braga, you’re in for a ride with this movie. She is, in my opinion, one of the best actresses alive today. In Aquarius, she stars as a 65-year-old trying to keep the home in which she pledged to die. In a quiet, yet stoically powerful performance, she reminds us that identity often intersects with the spaces in which we live.

In Lyon, the second biggest city in France after Paris, a man confronts the church about a prominent priest who sexually assaulted him and his friends when they were young.

The man, being religious, wanted to keep the issue within the church. He only asked that the pedophile’s priesthood be revoked so that he doesn’t assault more children.

When it becomes clear that the church will not act, he considers legal action, even though the statute of limitations has expired. But, as is usual in these cases, he was far from being the only victim.

Michael Jackson’s death triggers the sudden unraveling of a young imam’s buttoned-up life in this idiosyncratic Egyptian character study. The news of the singer’s passing sets Khaled (Ahmed El-Fishawy) straining against reawakened memories of his youth as a mullet-sporting MJ fanatic, before his joyful creative spark was stamped out by two disparate forces: a mocking, macho dad who punished Khaled for his vulnerability and the conservative uncle who took him under his wing.

Sheikh Jackson mostly takes place across two intertwining timelines: Khaled’s free-spirited adolescence and his adulthood, which has so far been defined by a self-flagellating, fire-and-brimstone brand of Islam. These two strands form a neat illustration of the binary options Khaled was led to believe he had to choose from — but, as the movie’s title hints, he might not have to choose at all, a revelation that doesn’t come easy because it flies in the face of everything he’s been taught. Free from the judgemental impulses of Western cinema when it comes to characters like Khaled, Sheikh Jackson is both an introspective portrait of the universal struggle of defining one’s own identity and a refreshingly nuanced look at how that experience might play out in the modern Arab world.

A young woman’s coming-of-age threatens to topple the uneasy hierarchy of her family in this striking debut from Croatian director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović. The trigger for Julija’s (Gracija Filipović) angsty rebellion is the arrival of her parents’ enigmatic wealthy friend, Javi (Cliff Curtis), whom her controlling father Ante (Leon Lučev) is hoping to squeeze a juicy investment out of. Part of hot-headed Ante’s strategy involves playing on Javi’s still-simmering feelings for Ante’s wife Nela (Danica Čurčić) — a dicey game to play when you have a temper like his. It’s also a very manipulative one, and the film lives in the atmosphere of claustrophobia that comes with being a woman in Ante’s life. Though her mother seems resigned to acceptance, Julija yearns for liberation, and it’s her burgeoning awareness of her own power as a woman that fires this drive for freedom. With its stunning Adriatic setting and haunting underwater sequences — the family are keen spearfishers — Murina is a film of natural beauty and human ugliness, a slow burn of a psychological drama that uses volatile teenage emotions as its incendiary fuel.

When we think about the atrocities committed during World War II, most people would remember the Holocaust, but this war was fought on multiple fronts, not just the West, and one of the most notorious incidents was the Rape of Nanjing. City of Life and Death depicts the massacre in black and white through various perspectives, which proved to be controversial considering some Japanese soldiers were depicted with sympathy, but it drives home the horror, the devastation, the terrible reality of the evil unfurled in the war. City of Life and Death is truly harrowing. The only consolation is that Nanjing thrives today as the Jiangsu province’s capital.

Two brothers played by Channing Tatum and Adam Driver decide to rob a local NASCAR event, the Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina.

They put together a team to help them, with Daniel Craig as the demolition expert and Katie Holmes as the gateway driver. Other big names behind this project are actors Seth MacFarlane and Hilary Swank; and director Steven Soderbergh, who is best known for Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Thirteen, and Magic Mike.

The main characters are cheerful and just goofy enough to be completely unpredictable. Their heist is as chaotic as it is random, which inevitably leads to many funny moments. The performances by the whole cast are amazing, Daniel Craig is almost unrecognizable.

A friend once described this movie as Ocean’s 7 Eleven, and it’s hard to come up with a better line.

Vague statement alert: Burning is not a movie that you “get”; it’s a movie you experience.

Based on a short story by Murakami, it’s dark and bleak in a way that comes out more in the atmosphere of the movie rather than what happens in the story.

Working in the capital Seoul, a young guy from a poor town near the North Korean border runs into a girl from his village. As he starts falling for her, she makes an unlikely acquaintance with one of Seoul’s wealthy youth (played by Korean-American actor Steven Yeun, pictured above.)

This new character is mysterious in a way that’s all-too-common in South Korea: young people who have access to money no one knows where it came from, and who are difficult to predict or go against.

Two worlds clash, poor and rich, in a movie that’s really three movies combined into one – a character-study, a romance, and a revenge thriller.

This is a documentary with a dark underbelly. When Bobby Shafran goes on his first day at college, everyone seems to recognize him. The person they’re actually recognizing is his twin brother, as the two were separated at birth by an adoption agency. A third brother surfaces to make the story even crazier, but things take a darker turn when questions arise about why they were separated as toddlers and to what end. If it wasn’t a documentary, this story would be an unusual science fiction on the themes of identity and nature vs. nurture.