The Remains of the Day

Mexico City, 1970-71. Cleo is a live-in domestic worker for a middle-class family whose father is walking out; she's also pregnant and abandoned, moving through a city on the edge of state violence. Cuarón shot it in black and white from his own childhood memories and the woman who raised him, letting the camera linger on the labor that holds a household up and gets no credit.

Why it’s here: The film is built on the argument that the people who keep a house running are the ones the house doesn't see. What's punk is its refusal to put the family's drama at the center and its quiet insistence on the nanny's. What's pedagogical is how class, race and gender sit in the same frame without commentary, and how a political massacre in the street is just part of a Tuesday for the people living through it.

A poor village driver in modern India schemes and claws his way out of servitude to a wealthy family, narrating his own rise with a wit that never quite lets you cheer for him cleanly. Adapted from Aravind Adiga's Booker Prize-winning novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in refusing to make its narrator's rise redemptive — Balram escapes servitude through the same corruption that trapped him, and the film doesn't pretend that's a clean victory. Pedagogical in naming the psychological mechanisms — the "rooster coop" — that keep servants complicit in their own subjugation.