Toni Erdmann

Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes 2016 in a year when most observers assumed the film would also take the Palme; it didn't, but it won the European Film Award for Best Film and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film established Ade as the most internationally significant German director of her generation and Sandra Hüller, who would later star in Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, as a major European actress.

Ines (Hüller) is a German management consultant working in Bucharest on an oil-company restructuring brief that will result in mass redundancies. Her father Winfried (Peter Simonischek) (a recently retired piano teacher with a fondness for elaborate practical jokes) turns up unannounced and starts impersonating a life coach called Toni Erdmann, complete with false teeth and a wig, in increasingly inappropriate professional contexts. The film's central question is what each of them owes the other, and what kind of work is doing what to each of them.

The famous third-act party sequence (Ines's birthday brunch turning into a nude team-building event, then a Whitney Houston karaoke duet) operates as one of the most carefully built comic-emotional climaxes in 21st-century cinema. The film runs 162 minutes; few have wasted a frame.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most assured German comedy of recent decades, and the rare workplace satire that earns its emotional risks. Hüller and Simonischek anchor one of the great recent father-daughter portraits in any cinema.