Cinobo What's Worth Watching
A selection of films available on Cinobo right now. Updated when something worth your time appears.
All We Imagine as Light 2024 · Payal Kapadia · India · Grand Prix · Cannes ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Three women working at the same Mumbai hospital — a senior nurse whose husband disappeared to Germany years ago, her younger colleague longing for someone she can’t have, and a new arrival trying to survive the city’s indifference. When they travel to a coastal village, something opens. Kapadia works in a register between documentary and fiction, between waking and dreaming. Meditative, luminous, and genuinely unforgettable. Won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2024.
Crossing 2024 · Levan Akin · Georgia/Sweden · Teddy Award · Berlin ⭐⭐⭐⭐
A retired Georgian schoolteacher travels to Istanbul to find her long-lost transgender niece. What begins as a search film — procedural, purposeful — becomes something quieter and more profound: about the borders we cross between who we were and who we’re willing to become. Won the Teddy Award at Berlin 2024.
Exodus 2023 · Abbe Hassan · Sweden ⭐⭐⭐⭐
A people smuggler takes a twelve-year-old Syrian girl separated from her family somewhere along the route to Sweden. A road movie that refuses both sentimentality and despair — about immigration not as a political issue but as a human one. Hassan doesn’t make the smuggler a hero or a villain; he makes him a person, which is more difficult and more interesting.
Triangle of Sadness 2022 · Ruben Östlund · Sweden · Palme d’Or · Cannes ⭐⭐⭐⭐½
A yacht full of billionaires, models, and influencers. A Russian oligarch who insists the captain drink with him during a storm. A deserted island where the only person who can actually feed everyone is the cleaning lady. Östlund dismantles class, capitalism, and the stories we tell ourselves about merit — and makes you laugh while he does it, and then makes you uncomfortable about having laughed. The third act is where it becomes genuinely great. Won the Palme d’Or at Cannes 2022.
Behind the Haystacks — Πίσω από τις Θημωνιές 2021 · Asimina Proedrou · Greece · Best Film · Thessaloniki Film Festival ⭐⭐⭐⭐
A tragic incident on Greece’s northern border befalls a local family of three, pushing them to face their own impasses while having to consider the price for their actions. Proedrou’s debut works with great restraint — no manipulative music, no dramatic confrontations, just the slow accumulation of consequence. A film about the weight of a decision and who ends up carrying it.
Full Time — À Plein Temps 2021 · Éric Gravel · France · Best Actress · Venice · Laure Calamy ⭐⭐⭐½
A single mother raising two children in the Paris suburbs tries to get to a job interview in the city during a transit strike. Gravel shoots it like a thriller — relentless, claustrophobic, scored with pounding electronica — about how just staying financially afloat can feel like a white-knuckle survival exercise. Laure Calamy won Best Actress at Venice.
The People Upstairs — Los Vecinos de Arriba 2020 · Cesc Gay · Spain · Goya Award ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Two long-married couples have dinner. One makes an unexpected proposal that turns the evening into an emotional earthquake. Spain’s answer to Perfect Strangers — sharper, funnier, and more honest about long-term relationships than most films dare to be. What it understands about boredom and desire and the stories couples tell each other to keep going is uncomfortably precise.
Parasite — 기생충 2019 · Bong Joon-ho · South Korea · Palme d’Or · Cannes · Oscar · Best Picture ⭐⭐⭐⭐½
A poor Seoul family systematically infiltrates the household of a wealthy one. Bong Joon-ho builds the first half as a dark comedy of class aspiration, precise and very funny, then pulls the floor out completely. The house itself is the film’s real argument: who gets to live above ground, who gets buried below, and the violence required to maintain that arrangement.
Ballad for a Pierced Heart — Η Μπαλάντα της Τρύπιας Καρδιάς 2019 · Yannis Economides · Greece · Hellenic Film Academy · 1 Win · 18 Nominations ⭐⭐⭐⭐
In a small Greek town, when amorous passion collides with greed, the bodies start piling up. Economides’ most operatic film — loud, dark, blackly comic, and completely committed to its own internal logic. The tone shifts between farce and tragedy without warning. Not for everyone. But if you surrender to it, there is something genuinely wild and alive here that Greek cinema rarely permits itself.
Shoplifters — 万引き家族 2018 · Hirokazu Koreeda · Japan · Palme d’Or · Cannes ⭐⭐⭐⭐
On the margins of Tokyo, a makeshift family connected not by blood but by necessity and genuine affection survives through petty theft. Koreeda asks one question and spends two hours refusing to answer it simply: what actually makes a family? He never forces a tear — he just shows you people living, and lets the weight accumulate on its own.
And Breathe Normally — Andið Eðlilega 2018 · Ísold Uggadóttir · Iceland · Directing Award · Sundance ⭐⭐⭐⭐½
A struggling Icelandic single mother working as a border guard flags the passport of an asylum seeker from Guinea-Bissau. What begins as a bureaucratic act becomes something more human and more complicated than either woman planned. About two people trapped by systems, and the unexpected solidarity that forms between them in the space those systems leave.
Suntan 2016 · Argyris Papadimitropoulos · Greece · Hellenic Film Academy · Best Film · Best Director ⭐⭐⭐⭐
A 40-year-old doctor moves to the small island of Antiparos to run the local clinic. Winter is empty and manageable. Then summer arrives with its bodies, its noise, its heat — and a young tourist who lets him tag along with her group. He doesn’t chase her so much as get swept away. One of the most uncomfortable portraits of male delusion in recent Greek cinema, disguised as a summer film.
Amerika Square — Πλατεία Αμερικής 2016 · Yannis Sakaridis · Greece · Best Film · Thessaloniki Film Festival ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Three stories set in Athens at the height of the crisis — a far-right nationalist logging immigrants in his building, a Syrian refugee trying to navigate the city’s bureaucratic maze, and an African immigrant caught between both worlds. Sakaridis refuses easy villains and easy heroes. A city that had run out of patience for everyone, including itself.
Chevalier 2015 · Athina Rachel Tsangari · Greece · Best Film · Hellenic Film Academy ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Six men on a fishing trip in the Aegean spontaneously agree to a competition: whoever is judged best at everything by the end wins a chevalier ring. Sleep quality, cholesterol levels, phone manner, erection firmness — everything becomes a metric. The funniest and most precise film about masculinity I have seen. It doesn’t argue a thesis; it simply observes, with anthropological patience, how men behave when status is the only currency on offer.
Force Majeure — Turist 2014 · Ruben Östlund · Sweden · Jury Prize · Cannes ⭐⭐⭐⭐½
An avalanche approaches. The father grabs his phone and runs. The mother stays and shields the children. When the danger passes, what remains is a question nobody wants to ask out loud. Östlund doesn’t let it go — not for one minute, not for the rest of the film. The precursor to Triangle of Sadness — colder, and in some ways more devastating.
Stratos — Το Μικρό Ψάρι 2014 · Yannis Economides · Greece · Berlin · Nominee Golden Bear · Hellenic Film Academy · 7 Wins ⭐⭐⭐⭐
An ex-con works nights in a bread factory and days as a hitman, saving money to free his imprisoned friend. Then he learns his loyalty has been exploited. Shot in stark black and white, with a stillness that makes the violence land harder when it comes. Closer to Melville than anything Greek cinema had produced before it.
Soul Kitchen 2009 · Fatih Akin · Germany · Special Jury Prize · Venice ⭐⭐⭐⭐½
Zinos is a German-Greek owner of a ramshackle Hamburg restaurant trying to hold everything together — his slipped disc, his increasingly eccentric chef, his ex-girlfriend who has moved to Shanghai, and his ex-con brother who keeps creating disasters. Fatih Akin in his most purely enjoyable mode: warm, funny, overflowing with music and food and Hamburg neighbourhood energy.
Soul Kicking — Η Ψυχή στο Στόμα 2006 · Yannis Economides · Greece · Cannes · Critics’ Week ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Takis is trapped. Takis tries to escape. Takis wants money. He’s got a family, a baby, a home. Takis is being cheated. He loves her and suffers. His boss tops them all. Takis has run out of time. A portrait of a working-class man being crushed from every direction at once, with nowhere left to go and no language left except rage. It doesn’t let you rest because Takis can’t.
Matchbox — Σπιρτόκουτο 2002 · Yannis Economides · Greece · Hellenic Film Academy · Best Film ⭐⭐⭐⭐½
A grumpy middle-aged man in Athens is having a hard time with his business partner and a hell of a time with his family. The film that announced Economides and changed Greek cinema in one move — claustrophobic, verbally explosive, set entirely in the sweltering concrete heat of a summer apartment. People who resemble matches: too much friction, too little space. One spark is all it takes.
Mostly Martha — Bella Martha 2001 · Sandra Nettelbeck · Germany ⭐⭐⭐⭐
A perfectionist head chef in Hamburg lives entirely for her work — until her sister dies and she must care for her niece, and a charming Italian chef arrives to share her kitchen. Uses food as a language — cold and precise in Martha’s hands at first, warm and generous in Mario’s. A film that understands the relationship between control and grief without announcing it. Later remade in Hollywood as No Reservations, but the original has something the remake lost.