Culturish's Top 50 Foreign Films

[Brad]

41. Pierrot Le Fou 

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard (1965) 

"Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 drama tells the story of a bored Parisian businessman (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who abruptly decides to leave his wealthy wife one night at a party and take off for the south of France with his ex-lover, the family baby sitter (Anna Karina). As they're pursued by Algerian gangsters and a variety of other nefarious forces known and unknown, they resemble a kind of Bonnie and Clyde. The movie was shot without a script and, frankly, this fact is apparent throughout: Godard's fans regard it as a masterpiece of improvised spontaneity and perhaps the peak of the French New Wave of the '60s; others find it a pretentious and confusing bore, full of annoying anti-American jabs. However you may stand on the issue, the Provencal scenery is pretty, the movie-star chemistry is potent and Karina (then Mrs. Godard) has never looked more stunning." 

— William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

[Brad]

40. L’Atalante 

Directed by Jean Vigo (1934) 

"A cine-poem ode to the rhythms of life and love set on a barge travelling along the Seine, Jean Vigo's L'Atalante stands as one of cinema's indisputable masterpieces. Jean (Jean Dasté) is the skipper who brings bride Juliette (Dita Parlo) aboard his barge to share cabin space with several dozen cats and grumpy first mate Père Jules (Michel Simon). As honeymoon canoodling turns to unhappy squabbling, Vigo turns the gritty essence of working class canal life into lyrical poetry." 

— Jamie Russell, BBC

[Brad]

39. Russian Ark (Russkiy kovcheg)

Directed by Aleksandr Sokurov (2002) 

"This could have been just the greatest, daftest, most elaborate stunt in movie history — a single, unbroken, 87-min. Steadicam shot that winds and pirouettes as it accompanies an unseen narrator and a 19th century French marquis (Sergei Dontsov) through 33 rooms of the State Hermitage Museum in an attempt both to give us a tour of the St. Petersburg palace's artistic treasures and to encapsulate three centuries of Russian history, of the Czars and commoners who lived, worked, danced, suffered and died in those sumptuous rooms and labyrinthine corridors — but because Alexander Sokurov is as much an artist and storyteller as he is a magician-technician, viewers can forget the absurd degree of difficulty in the logistical challenge of keeping nearly a thousand extras and dozens of crew members out of the way of Tilman Buttner's high-definition digital camera and instead go along for the ride in this regal fun house — madhouse, as Buttner rushes after a Czar's children or pauses to scrutinize a Van Dyck Madonna or performs his own virtuoso minuet when he enters the Nicholas Hall to discover a ballroom full of whirling aristocrats who dance the night away and finally exit down the grand staircase and out of the palace at dawn for a coda that will have the movie's audience gasping in exhilarated exhaustion, whispering astonished gratitude to Sokurov for having created vigorous art out of 21st century video technique and asking themselves, 'What's the Russian word for Wow!?'" 

— Richard Corliss, Time Magazine

[Brad]

38. Woman In The Dunes (Suna no onna) 
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara (1964) 

"...there is never a moment when the film doesn't look absolutely realistic, and it isn't about sand anyway, but about life. "Are you shoveling to survive, or surviving to shovel?'' the man asks the woman, and who cannot ask the same question? "Woman in the Dunes'' is a modern version of the myth of Sisyphus, the man condemned by the gods to spend eternity rolling a boulder to the top of a hill, only to see it roll back down. 

[Brad]

37. The Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai) 

Directed by Akira Kurasowa (1954) 

"The most popular cinematic export from Japan is inarguably the samurai movie. Whole books have been devoted to the genre, and more than one mail-order video business has made a tidy profit shipping samurai tapes and DVDs around the world. The most important samurai movie is Akira Kurosawa's 1954 feature, Seven Samurai, which not only impacted the way the genre was viewed, but elevated its status. Seven Samurai was influential not only in Japan and for foreign film enthusiasts, but it led to a popular and reasonably faithful remake, The Magnificent Seven. And, although Japanese critics during the '50s were dismissive of the picture, it has since achieved an almost mythical status and was recently selected by a group of '00 critics as the Best Japanese Movie of All-Time." 

James Berardinelli, ReelViews

[Brad]

36. Cries & Whispers (Viskningar och rop)

Directed by Ingmar Bergman (1972) 

"Ingmar Bergman's magnificent, moving and very mysterious new film, Cries and Whispers...[has] a focus so sharp that it seems to have the clarity of something seen through the medium of fever. Every sense has been heightened to a supernatural degree. Fears, wishes and suspicions never spoken occasionally rustle through the house like wind. We can even hear the newly dead talk, distantly and somewhat reproachfully, mindless of the rapidity with which physical decay sets in....[Cries and Whispers] is not an easy film to describe or to endure. It stands alone and it reduces almost everything else you're likely to see this season to the size of a small cinder." 

— Vincent Canby, The New York Times

[Brad]

35. The Leopard (Il Gattopardo)

Directed by Luchino Visconti (1963) 

"'The Leopard' is a nonpareil historical epic from an era that specialized in them, the early '60s age of "Lawrence of Arabia," "El Cid," "Spartacus" and "Doctor Zhivago." (This version is also available in the deluxe new two-disc Criterion DVD.) In that time, Visconti was uniquely suited for his film's double message and theme. A master of both grand opera and neo-realism, he came from those aristocratic classes, born into Milanese nobility, but he was also a political progressive and radical leftist. Much as he laments the prince's passage and the triumph of the bourgeois, he shows them as forces that cannot be stopped--while wistfully longing for the workers' revolution that never erupted. History marched on, but his beautiful film still stands alone--like the Leopard in his last shining hour." 

— Michael Wilmington, The Chicago Tribune

[Brad]

34. In The Mood For Love (Fa yeung nin wa) 

Directed by Wong Kar-Wai (2000) 

"Such care goes into every shot, every scene and gesture of Wong Kar-wai's masterly In the Mood for Love, the effect is fetishistic, hypnotic and swooningly lovely. Stylized, set-designed to the last hair wisp, the film is a mixture of bold devices with delicate understatement that leave a remarkable aftereffect. 

At its soulful heart, the seventh feature film from the cerebral and romantic Wong Kar-Wai is a love story. Or, perhaps, it's better to say that it is about the memory of love, expressed with an artful self-consciousness through film." 

— Liam Lacey, Toronto Globe and Mail

[Brad]

33. The Decalogue 
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski (1989) 

"Among Kieslowski's films, including his celebrated "Red," "White" and "Blue" trilogy, the work that towers over everything is "The Decalogue," his 10-part, nearly 10-hour made-for-television series of reflections on the Ten Commandments. Although "The Decalogue" has been shown in New York by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and is available on home video, it is only just now having its commercial release in the city, at the Lincoln Plaza. 

If its 10 parts inevitably vary in quality, in its entirety, the cycle -- which was first shown on Polish television in 1988-89 -- stands as a masterwork of modern cinema, essential viewing for anyone who cares about the movies as a serious art form." 

— Stephen Holden, The New York Times

[Brad]

32. Stalker

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1979) 

"Subscribing to the belief that the eyes are the windows to the soul, Tarkovsky locates Stalker's spiritual center in the weathered countenances of his world-weary protagonists. One of the cinema's greatest portraitists, the director offers up a gallery of masterful close-ups, some dipped in sepia-toned bronzes, others cast in the harsh light of a cloudy morning, several obscured by dank, dark shadows. No two alike and all stunning in their formal composition and expressiveness, Tarkovsky's visages—from the large, sorrowful eyes of Kajdanovsky and the anguished expressions of Solonitsyn to the heart-rending candor of Frejndlikh—form the emotional backbone of his heavily metaphorical tale. However, though his stark close-ups powerfully acquaint us with his characters' inner turmoil, Tarkovsky nonetheless regularly upsets any measure of cozy intimacy by eschewing establishing shots and comforting transitions, juxtaposing his standard setups with disorienting pans, zooms, and reverse zooms that create a mood of overwhelming physical and psychological crisis. With every constricting doorway frame and methodically choreographed camera movement seemingly designed to impart an impression of what's being left unseen outside the picture's edges, the director's alternately enchanting, austere, and bewildering mise-en-scène is frequently one of denial and disruption." 

- Nick Schager, Slant Magazine