Movies to change your life

Follow Antonio's quest for his own bicycle, on which he depends for his job as a bill sticker. If you have ever believed that every man makes his own fortune, get ready to have this belief questioned.

A family in Iran is dealing with the separation of the parents: the mother wants to move abroad, the father wants to stay in the country to stay close to his own father, who has Alzheimer's. Things get worse when the father is accused of having accidentally caused a miscarriage in his father's caregiver. It's a movie about the lack of communication and empathy that only makes one another's lives worse.

People in slow-motion. Traffic in timelapse. The natural landscape standing still, as if nothing were happening. It's a movie without commentary that shows and makes you reflect on the role of mankind in the evolution of the Earth, and on the discrepancy between our fast-paced life and the long now in which the planet is living.

A man is falsely accused of sexual assault on a child. It's a little bit preachy as a movie, but your (fully justified) anger at the end of it should make you think about all the times you jumped on a bandwagon without looking at the whole picture.

Of course, it's a quirky, fairy-tale-like movie with some kind of manic pixie dream girl as the protagonist, but we all need a reminder that our lives can have a little more flavour, and Amélie is here to show us how.

A couple of girls in rural Spain watch Frankenstein, the 1931 movie, and the monster becomes a part of their real lives. Some see it as an allegory about Franco's regime during the Spanish Civil War, but even if you ignore the symbolism in this movie, you'll see how reality and make-belief blend in the girls' minds – and in ours.

Watching this movie about addiction is like having someone push you and kick you repeatedly in the belly while you're on the floor. It's a long descent towards darkness, it's deeply depressing, it will stay with you for days, but boy, it is one of the most powerful cinematic experiences ever.

Movies are like dreams: They are both deceitful. This movie, quite possibly David Lynch's best, follows an aspiring actress moving to L.A. and finding herself dragged into a mystery. The truth is much, much different.

Christopher Nolan claims that the similarities between "Paprika" and his "Inception" are accidental, but there are too many of them to really believe that. But when it comes to show the parallel world of dreams, "Paprika" turns to 10 what "Inception" barely achieves. I doubt that any cinematic representation of dreams has ever come close to what this movie does.

What was the last time you have seen an African movie? Well, it's time to correct that, so let's start from the very first African movie production ever. You'll probably find the movie quite heavy-handed, but as a tale narrated by the receiving end of colonialism, it's surprisingly measured.