Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö (The match factory girl)

Allegedly intended as a work “that will make Robert Bresson seem like a director of epic action pictures,” Kaurismäki’s early masterpiece and blackest of comedies stars Kati Outinen as Iris, a factory worker whose lonely existence is punctuated by glimmers of hope—a pink party dress, the attention of a man at a bar, a pregnancy—that all result in humiliation and heartbreak. As gripping as it is grim, almost without dialogue, the film depicts Iris’s suffering and the meticulous revenge she enacts on those who are its cause. “Few films are ever this unremittingly unyielding,” Roger Ebert wrote. “I found myself as tightly gripped as with a good thriller.”