The Japanese animation ChaO, directed by Yasuhiro Aoki and set in a fictionalized Shanghai where humans and fish-people coexist, is “delightfully offbeat.”

Costa-Gavras’s Z, based on the 1963 assassination of a Greek opposition leader, is “a film of our time,” the late critic Roger Ebert wrote in his 1969 review.

The “extraordinary Turkish odyssey,” Yol, was filmed by Serif Güney during his 20 years in jail on political charges.

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness by Carl Flyn is “a reminder that the places we might conceive of as empty or barren are no such thing.”

Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege 1942-43 is a bone-chilling 1998 account of the turning point of World War II’s Eastern Front.