Midaq Alley

A family living in a semi-basement in Seoul schemes its way, one fake résumé at a time, into the staff of a wealthy household upstairs. The comedy of the con curdles into something much darker as the two families discover how little room there is at the bottom of the same staircase.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the genre-bending: Bong Joon-ho starts as a heist comedy and keeps turning the floor over until the audience realizes the joke was always about who gets to be comfortable. The pedagogy is in the architecture. Stairs, windows, smells and flooded streets show class instead of lecturing about it, so the film teaches a viewer to read inequality in physical space, and refuses to make either family a simple villain. It is a rare crowd-pleaser that sends people out of the theater arguing about structure rather than individuals.

In a poor neighborhood of Tehran, nine-year-old Ali loses his little sister Zahra's only pair of shoes. Their family can't afford another pair, and their father can barely cover the rent, so the two keep it secret and share Ali's sneakers, swapping them between her morning school shift and his afternoon one. Ali sees a chance to win a pair at a children's race, and everything comes down to it.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the scale: Majidi makes a film about poverty without a villain, a speech or a rescue, and trusts the children's point of view to carry all of it. Nothing in it is shouted. The shoes are the whole argument. The pedagogy is in that restraint. A young viewer sees what a missing pair of shoes costs a family, how kids shield their parents from shame, and how much dignity and care two siblings can hold at once. It is warm and funny and never sentimental, and it is an easy first film from outside the English-speaking world. Majidi worked inside Iran's censorship system, and the film keeps politics out of frame by design, so its critique of class comes through the situation and not through anything the characters say. Good for the whole family, with subtitles.