Let me argue for Incendies as the film that established Denis Villeneuve as a filmmaker with a specific and serious sensibility.

Before Incendies, Villeneuve had made Polytechnique, which was devastating and formally accomplished. But Incendies is the film where his relationship between form and subject matter became distinctive.

The film tells its story backwards and forwards simultaneously — we follow the children discovering their mother's history at the same pace as we follow the mother living it. The structure is not a puzzle. It's a statement about how the past shapes the present without the present's knowledge.

The revelation at the end of Incendies is the most harrowing piece of storytelling I've encountered in contemporary cinema. It's harrowing not because of what it reveals about the plot but because of what it reveals about the logic of historical violence: how atrocity is passed down, how patterns repeat, how the damage done to one person propagates forward through time.

Villeneuve has spent his career making large-scale science fiction since then. Incendies is the film that explains why those films feel like they're about something more than their premises.