Amour

Michael Haneke made Amour at seventy, after four decades of austere European art cinema and the previous Palme winner The White Ribbon. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2012 (Haneke's second in three years) followed by the Academy Award for Best International Feature, the Golden Globe, four BAFTAs, and the European Film Award for Best Film. Emmanuelle Riva, then eighty-five, became the oldest actress ever nominated for a leading-role Oscar.

Georges and Anne, retired music teachers in their eighties, return from a Schubert concert to their elegant Paris apartment. The next morning Anne suffers a small stroke at breakfast. The film follows what comes next with a clinical patience: another stroke, paralysis, the slow attenuation of language, and Georges's increasingly impossible attempt to honour her wish not to be returned to hospital. Haneke shoots almost entirely inside the apartment, with Darius Khondji's still camera and almost no music.

Jean-Louis Trintignant came out of long retirement at eighty-one to play Georges; this would be his final major role. Riva and Trintignant share a chemistry built almost entirely on shared silence and small gestures; Isabelle Huppert, as their distant daughter, provides the only window onto the outside world. Amour is the most tender film Haneke ever made and also the most remorseless, a study of love at the point where it costs everything.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The defining film about end-of-life care in modern European cinema, and one of the very few works to take that subject seriously without sentiment or polemic. Late Haneke at his most humane, and unrepeatable for it.