Culturish's Top 50 Foreign Films

[Brad]

21. The Best of Youth (La Meglio gioventù) 
Directed by Marco Tullio Giordana (2003) 

Like all great popular melodramas, "The Best of Youth" has a pull that is strong enough to be classified as gravitational. Its length enables us to be involved in its characters' lives to a thrilling extent, and its warmth and intimacy, its belief that, as one character says, "What is the purpose of life but to live?" make that involvement worthwhile. The hectic nature of our contemporary lives means that one day might not be enough to experience this multi-hour epic, but no matter. Commit two nights to this exceptional film, and remember it for a lifetime. 

— Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times

[Brad]

20. Day For Night (Nuit américaine) 
Directed by François Truffaut (1973) 

“Truffaut's film, made in 1973 and being revived this week at Facets with a newly-struck 35-mm. print, is a poem in praise of making movies. Not good movies, not bad movies - movies. It takes place at the Victorine Studio in Nice, in the south of France, which has produced movies since the silent days. Truffaut himself plays Ferrand, the director of a movie named "Meet Pamela," which is pretty clearly going to be a stinker. Ferrand exhibits not the slightest sign that he knows this, or would care if he did; he isn't intended to be a director of ambitious movies (like Truffaut), but a technician, in love with the process - with the stunts and special effects, the chemistry between the actors, the daily shooting schedule. 

Strange, seeing this movie again in 1997, how much it reminded me of the recent films "Ed Wood" and "Boogie Nights." Those are both films about people for whom the end product - the film itself - is only the necessary byproduct of their real reason to be in the movie business, which is to be on the set. To be making a movie. For a certain kind of emotionally footloose, artistic personality, a movie production is like a homeless shelter: Their basic animal needs are satisfied, they are too tired to see beyond the morning call, and sex, when it comes, is between people who are careful to agree it doesn't mean too much.” 

— Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times

[Brad]

19. The Man With The Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom)
Directed by Dziga Vertov (1929) 

“The film's conclusion is aesthetically beautiful and ideologically committed. Oddly, in the 1930s the Stalinists didn't think so. Vertov fell into disfavor with their regime and this film and others were accused of formalist error, of placing aesthetics ahead of ideological commitment. It's unfortunate that a man who wanted to link the cinematic machine with the people could be so mistrusted, because Man With a Movie Camera has a wonderfully rousing coda that links spectators within the theatrical diegesis to their onscreen counterparts (the film within the film). And as they watch their images everything coalesces: machines (typewriter keys, spinning wheels, mechanical spinners, streetcars) and people (walking the streets, driving cars, resting at the beach) in rhythm, and in kinship. But perhaps the cameraman riding above the sea of prismatically coalesced imagery bothered the Stalinists. Perhaps they saw in that cameraman not formalist error but a brilliant representation of the powerful kino-eye to not only see and know all then (1929), but to possibly further see and expose a darkening future threatened by totalitarianism.” 

— Grant Tracey, Images Journal

[Brad]

18. The Spirit of the Beehive (El Espíritu de la colmena) 
Directed by Victor Erice (1973) 

“Beehive remains arguably the finest and most beautifully wrought first film of the European '70s, a mysterious crucible as elusive, concrete, and visually primal as anything by Herzog, Straub, Olmi, or Denis. But it is also an unashamedly symbol-drunk piece of work; as if shopworking with folklore that doesn't exist, Erice insists through his visuals that everything, even the vast, furrowed Castilian plains themselves, signifies emotional intangibles. Set in post–Civil War 1940, the movie dreamily documents a rural village's quotidian, but does it so elliptically that, as is the vogue in recent Asian cinema, half the story and all of the backstory must be sought at the movie's fringes, between its scenes, and in its silent ruminations.” 

— Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice

[Brad]

17. Come & See (Idi i smotri)
Directed by Elem Klimov (1985) 

“Elem Klimov, the new head of the Soviet Filmmakers Association, explores the horrors of war in his classic coming-of-age drama "Come and See." Directing with an angry eloquence, he taps into that hallucinatory nether world of blood and mud and escalating madness that Francis Ford Coppola found in "Apocalypse Now." And though he draws a surprisingly vivid performance from his inexperienced teen lead, Klimov's prowess is his visual poetry, muscular and animistic, like compatriot Andrei Konchalovsky's in his epic ‘Siberiade.’” 

— Rita Kempley, The Washington Post

[Brad]

16. Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du paradis) 
Directed by Marcel Carné (1945) 

“This lushly romantic creation, directed by Marcel Carné and written by Jacques Prévert, is a one-of-a-kind film, a sumptuous epic about the relations between theatre and life. At first, it may seem a romance set in the Paris of Balzac; it turns into a comparison of dramatic modes-it includes at least five kinds of theatrical performance. And, encompassing these, it is a film poem on the nature and varieties of love-sacred and profane, selfless and possessive. It was made during the Occupation, and it is said that the starving extras made away with some of the banquets before they could be photographed. With Jean-Louis Barrault as the soulful mime Debureau (the Pierrot-Barrault sucks in his cheeks so much that he sometimes suggests Dietrich); the incomparable Arletty as Garance; Pierre Brasseur as the Shakespearean actor Lemaître (the Harlequin); Louis Salou as the count; Marcel Herrand as the philosophical murderer; Pierre Renoir as the ragpicker-informer; and Maria Casarés, who has the unrewarding role of the theatre manager's daughter, who marries Debureau and becomes the mother of an abominable offspring. (The child is pure Hollywood.)” 

— Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

[Brad]

15. Ran 
Directed by Akira Kurosawa (1985) 

“Set in the 16th century, Akira Kurosawa's epic spectacle, a variation on the theme of King Lear, is static, but it deepens, and it has its own ornery splendor. It's a totally conceptualized work--perhaps the biggest piece of conceptual art ever made. For the first 40 minutes or so, the picture is all preparation, and it seems dead, but then the preparation begins to pay off, and by the end the fastidiousness and the monumental scale of what Kurosawa has undertaken can flood you with admiration. With Mieko Harada as Lady Kaede, the vengeful demon; Tatsuya Nakadai as the warlord head of the clan; the Japanese transvestite pop star known as Peter as the Fool; and Hisashi Ikawa as Kurogane, who defies Lady Kaede. The fine, harsh, percussive score is by Toru Takemitsu.” 

— Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

[Brad]

14. Sansho The Bailiff (Sanshô dayû)
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi (1954) 

“As many historians have noted, the humanist ideals professed in Kenji Mizoguchi’s masterpiece Sansho The Bailiff are more than a little anachronistic, retro-fitting 20th-century notions onto the film’s medieval setting. Sentiments like “All Men are created equal” or “Everyone is entitled to happiness” don’t really wash in a period so firmly entrenched in militarism and sharp class distinctions. But in 1954, with Japan and the rest of the planet still reeling from the cruel nationalism that sparked World War II, the film’s thematic resonance was unmistakable, a powerful rebuke to the tyrannies of the recent past. Told with the stark simplicity of a fairy tale, Sansho The Bailiff demonstrates how compassion can overcome the forces of hatred and oppression, and shows how trying it is to remain decent and humane in an inhospitable world. Tragedy and transcendence are equally present, and their coexistence produces one of the most profoundly moving final scenes in film history.” 

— Scott Tobias, The Onion A.V. Club

[Brad]

13. The Rules of The Game (La Règle du jeu) 
Directed by Jean Renoir (1939) 

“The most famous line in Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, spoken by Renoir himself in the part of the roly-poly playboy wastrel Octave, is ''Everyone has their reasons.'' That line is, of course, the living expression of Renoir's humanism, his love and understanding of everyone on screen — aristocrats, servants, lovers, fools. But as I watched The Rules of the Game again, in a lustrous new print that will be playing around the country over the next several months, another line, this one also spoken by Octave, struck me with greater force: ''Today, everyone lies,'' he says. ''So why shouldn't simple people like us lie as well?'' The prescience of that line — the connection it makes between what the powerful do and what ''we'' do — has a haunting application to the world of today. 

It also expresses the burbling vibrance of The Rules of the Game, a hunting-party movie in which everyone we see is deluding somebody else or, more possibly, themselves. They all have their reasons, but that doesn't mean they're innocent. And it's that mood of moral wind-shifting, of lightly blowing duplicity, that gives such force to Renoir's staging, which set the tone for Altman and everyone else — the action that spills in three directions at once, around the mansion and across the grounds, upstairs and downstairs. The Rules of the Game is a comedy, a tragedy, a portrait of class manners, a love story of touching caprice (who will Nora Grégor's Christine fall for? Whoever woos her at the right moment), and far and away the cinema's greatest midsummer night's dream.” 

— Owen Glieberman, Entertainment Weekly

[Brad]

12. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes)
Directed by Werner Herzog (1972) 

“Aguirre gave Klaus Kinski his career role—a half-mad actor playing a full-fledged lunatic—but the filmmaker is the protagonist. The opening sequence—in which the Spanish expedition, complete with sedan chairs, llamas, and Indian slaves, descends out of the Andes through the clouds—is a spectacular show of cinematic might. The exclamation point is a cannon that explodes as it falls into the river. "The spectacle is real; the danger is real," Herzog later boasted. "It is the real life of the jungle, not the botanic gardens of the studio." 

As with all Herzog, fiction is based in documentary—and vice versa. (The movie, which was shot in sequence, purports to be drawn from a fake historical journal.) Landscape is paramount; animals lend their behavioral presence. The camera is exceptionally mobile even as the action is shot midstream on wooden rafts. Each bend in the river compels the spectator to consider how this movie was actually made. Every shot suggests some sort of ordeal, even if it is only hanging out in the Amazon. The on-set tension was legendary. Herzog and Kinski each famously threatened to kill the other—the Method taken well beyond madness.” 

— J. Hoberman , The Village Voice