Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the great architects of modern European cinema, had little interest in making films behave properly. After beginning in the orbit of Italian neorealism, he gradually turned his attention away from social reality and towards the private landscapes of disconnection, desire and boredom. L’Avventura (1960) is the film where that language fully crystallises; the first part of the loose trilogy completed by La notte and L’eclisse.

It begins with a disappearance and then, rather perversely, loses interest in solving it. Anna vanishes from a small island; her friends search for her, but the real subject gradually becomes the strange emotional vacuum her absence exposes.

Antonioni’s revolution is almost embarrassingly simple: he lets nothing happen for long enough that we are forced to notice everything else. Architecture, bodies, silences, the geometry of a room- all become more expressive than dialogue. Monica Vitti and Gabriele Ferzetti move through the film like people trying to remember what desire is supposed to feel like.

It’s often called a film about alienation, which is true but not quite sufficient. L’Avventura is less interested in loneliness than in the peculiar boredom of people who can no longer tell what they want. The missing woman becomes almost incidental. What disappears instead is certainty about love, morality, narrative- even cinema itself.

No wonder the film caused such a stir at Cannes in 1960, where it received the Jury Prize. Antonioni had made a mystery in which the mystery itself slowly becomes irrelevant. And he is perfectly happy to leave the hole open.

This film is chosen by Andreas

In Cold War, love is no refuge from history, but an equally erratic force. The Lovers Wiktor and Zula move through postwar Europe as if they can only truly desire one another when something stands between them: a border, another person, a regime, a departure.

Pawlikowski tells the story in radical ellipses. Years disappear in a cut; major events happen off-screen. What remains is rhythm: attraction, disappearance, return. Music, too, keeps shifting its meaning; from folk song to state folklore, from jazz to memory- carrying almost as much history as the characters themselves.

The tightly framed black-and-white images are stunning, at times almost suspiciously beautiful. But beneath that formal control lies something restless and unreasonable. Cold War may ultimately be less about a great love than about the persistent longing for a place; political, geographical, emotional, where one might finally be able to stay.

Polish-British director Paweł Pawlikowski began as a documentary filmmaker and, after years in England, returned to Poland to make Ida and Cold War. That movement between East and West runs through his films. Loosely inspired by his parents’ turbulent relationship, Cold War won him Best Director at Cannes in 2018.

This film is chosen by Elisabeth

Spoorloos begins with a disappearance and gradually becomes a film about the unbearable need to know. Not grief itself, but the mind’s refusal to accept an empty space. Rex could perhaps survive Saskia’s absence; what he cannot survive is the absence of an answer.

George Sluizer strips the thriller of almost everything thrillers usually depend on. The perpetrator is revealed early, suspense is replaced by certainty and evil arrives without spectacle. There is something unusually cruel in the film’s calmness. Sluizer never rushes towards horror; he lets curiosity do the work. 

By the time Spoorloos reaches its famous ending, the trap has already become psychological: we need to know almost as badly as Rex does.  Few films understand so precisely that sometimes the answer is worse than the uncertainty...

Dutch-French filmmaker George Sluizer worked across documentary and fiction, often outside the Netherlands. Spoorloos, adapted from Tim Krabbé’s novella Het Gouden Ei, became his defining film and one of the most internationally influential Dutch thrillers. Its clinical restraint left a long shadow on psychological horror; Stanley Kubrick reportedly called it the most terrifying film he had seen. Sluizer later remade it in Hollywood as The Vanishing (1993), with a radically altered ending; a useful reminder of how much the original’s power lies in its refusal to offer relief.

This film is chosen by Maaike