35 Shots of Rum

Claire Denis made 35 rhums as a tribute to Ozu's Late Spring and to her own grandfather, and it is the warmest film in a body of work not otherwise known for warmth. Agnès Godard shot it, as she has shot most of Denis's films, and the palette — brown, amber, the sodium light of a Paris suburb at night — does much of the emotional work.

Alex Descas plays Lionel, an RER driver approaching the age at which his colleagues retire, and Mati Diop, later the director of Atlantics, plays his daughter Joséphine. They live in a flat where the routines have been settled for years. Denis lets whole scenes pass on the preparation of a meal or the changing of a rice cooker, and the film's central set-piece — a bar, a broken-down car, the Commodores' Nightshift on the jukebox, four people rearranging their attachments without speaking — is one of the great sequences of the last twenty years.

The film premiered at Venice and travelled the festival circuit rather than the awards one, which is why it remains less known than Beau Travail. Among Denis's admirers it is often the favourite: a film about a father and daughter that understands that love, at a certain point, consists mostly of getting out of the way.