For Fans of Taika Waititi

Every Waititi hallmark converges in Jojo Rabbit: the self-insert absurdist character (Hitler as an imaginary friend played for maximum ridiculousness), a child protagonist navigating grief through humor, and a gut-punch ending that earns every tear because the comedy set it up honestly. It won the Oscar for Adapted Screenplay and deserved it. The source novel, Caging Skies by Christine Leunens, is worth reading alongside it, not least to see how freely Waititi transforms raw material into something distinctly his own.

The 2014 film is a perfect object: a mockumentary about flat-sharing vampires in Wellington that uses the format to expose real loneliness and the absurdity of living too long. The FX television spinoff (set in New York) runs on the same engine and has become one of the best comedy series of the decade. What distinguishes both is that Waititi and Clement never mock the characters from outside; the joke is always that these ridiculous beings take themselves completely seriously, which is, of course, the human condition.

Ragnarok did not invent the self-aware blockbuster, but it applied Waititi's specific sensibility to a Marvel property with enough confidence to change what those films could sound like. The Jeff Goldblum-as-Grandmaster scenes, the Led Zeppelin needle drop, Korg as a gentle stoner revolutionary: these are a director insisting on authorship within a franchise machine. The result is the most purely enjoyable Thor film and one that convinced a generation of filmmakers that you could bring genuine comic voice into industrial production.

Before the international deals and the Oscars, there was Boy (2010), a low-budget New Zealand film about an 11-year-old waiting for his deadbeat father to become the hero he has invented in his head. It remains the purest statement of Waititi's core theme: the collision between the stories children tell themselves about their parents and the reality of adults who are simply not up to the job. The film is funny, the ending is honest, and Waititi plays the father himself with a charisma that makes you understand exactly why the boy was fooled.