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HBO Max Officially Says Goodbye to One of Cinema’s Greatest Directorial Debuts

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Do you know what unites Orson Welles, David Lynch, Sidney Lumet, and Jordan Peele? Each of them made their directorial debuts with movies that are now considered all-time classics. More recently, this list can easily be expanded to include Ari Aster, Celine Song, Charlotte Wells, and Emerald Fennell. However, one filmmaker is often overlooked in discussions on this topic, or, on other occasions, is treated like a token candidate from an exotic foreign land. The filmmaker in question made his directorial debut in 1955, and his work has been hugely influential on the careers of directors such as Wes Anderson. His first movie was also the first installment of a trilogy, and it is currently streaming in the United States on HBO Max.

However, those who haven’t yet seen it may want to hurry, as it will soon be removed from the platform. The film is largely credited for introducing global audiences to arthouse Indian cinema, a far cry from the more colorful Bollywood movies that traveled across the world. It was directed by the great Satyajit Ray, a pioneer of the “parallel cinema” movement in India who worked predominantly in the Bengali language. He won an honorary Oscar before his death in 1992, and was hugely influenced by the Italian neorealist movement. His 1955 classic borrowed elements from Italian neorealism but filtered them through a uniquely lyrical lens.













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Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz
Which Oscar Best Picture
Is Your Perfect Movie?

Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
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Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.

🪜Parasite

🌀Everything Everywhere

☢️Oppenheimer

🐦Birdman

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🪙No Country for Old Men

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01

What kind of film experience do you actually want?
The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.





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02

Which idea grabs you most in a film?
Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?





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03

How do you like your story told?
Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.





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04

What makes a truly great antagonist?
The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?





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05

What do you want from a film’s ending?
The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?





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06

Which setting pulls you in most?
Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.





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07

What cinematic craft impresses you most?
Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.





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08

What kind of main character do you root for?
The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.





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09

How do you feel about a film that takes its time?
Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.





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10

What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema?
The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?





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The Academy Has Decided
Your Perfect Film Is…

Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.

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Parasite

You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once

You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.

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Oppenheimer

You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.

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Birdman

You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.

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No Country for Old Men

You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.

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Here’s How Long You Have Left to Watch the Classic on HBO Max

Image via Aurora Film Corporation
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We’re talking, of course, about Pather Panchali, the first in Ray’s Apu Trilogy, which also includes Aparajito and Apur Sansar. A drama about the realities of life in rural India, the movie now holds a “Certified Fresh” 98% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The aggregator website’s consensus reads, “A film that requires and rewards patience in equal measure, Pather Panchali finds director Satyajit Ray delivering a classic with his debut.” While honoring Ray at the Cannes Film Festival in 2025, Anderson — his lifelong fan — said in an interview, “I watched (Ray’s 1961 title) Teen Kanya first, just because it happened to be available in a video store in Texas. That’s how I became interested in his films. I saw images from Ray’s work and thought, ‘That’s the way I want to be.’” Pather Panchali will be available on HBO Max until September 30. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.

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