The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

Jong-su, a young delivery worker and aspiring writer, runs into Hae-mi, a neighbor from his childhood. She goes on a trip and comes back with Ben, a rich and charming man who tells Jong-su his hobby is burning down greenhouses. Then Hae-mi vanishes. Lee Chang-dong adapts a Murakami story into a slow thriller about class, envy and what you can prove.

Why it’s here: The film turns class rage into a mystery that never resolves, which is how class often works. What's punk is that the poor man is the one telling the story and nobody believes him. What's pedagogical is how much the film shows without saying. It's 2.5 hours, slow, and ambiguous on purpose. Close relative: Parasite, which is in the suggestion log.

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.