La Femme Nikita from 1990 is an example of an excellent foreign film. The sets are gritty and dirty. You really get the feeling that this is really a black box, semi-unknown government division. It was remade as Point of No Return in the US. They both have a similar scene, Nikita blows up a building, the French one just has Anne Parillaud look in horror, the US version has to have someone ask Bridget Fonda, “How do you feel”, and she has to blurt out, “I just blew up a building, how do you think I feel.” I was like – if you not going to tell us, and leave us guessing, why speak at all? See them both, and you’ll really understand the appeal of foreign films, they really do leave more to your imagination, to try and make you think.
There’s a quiet, rather strange Japanese movie called After Life (the Japanese title is actually Wonderful Life, but the US release is titled After Life) that impressed me a lot when I saw it on campus 10+ years ago. I recently got it on DVD and enjoyed watching it for the second time.
The movie is a workplace drama about a group of coworkers and their clients…only it’s set in the afterlife. Each week a new group of recently deceased souls pass through a facility that looks like a rather run-down government building. They must choose one memory from their lives that they wish to take with them when they move on to eternity. The clients are a combination of actors and regular people, with some of the memories they choose being scripted and some being taken from interviews.
The plot involves one of the workers discovering a connection between his life (he was once alive, he’s not an angel or god or anything) and that of one of the clients. As the movie progresses more is revealed about the workers, including the relationships between them and why they are working in the memory facility instead of moving on like their clients.
Wendall Wagner mentioned Amarcord. Nothing wrong with that, but I’m more fond of Fellini’s Satyricon. (Possibly the theater I saw Amarcord in needed a projector because it wasn’t as vibrant as Satyricon.)
Currently on Netflix streaming, there’s a nice ultra-low budget Japanese film called Adrift in Tokyo. A loan shark enforcer “asks” an overdue client to accompany him on a long walk through the city. It absolutely isn’t one of my 10 favorite foreign movies, but it sidesteps the trite and predictable time after time. Not an action movie. Kinda sweet.
For those of us of a certain age, Kukla Fran and Ollie was our introduction to foreign film.
It was on CBS: the same network that respected the possibility of there being intelligent children enough to air Leonard Bernstein young people’s concerts and **Efron Marshall’s ** delightfully silly bible stories. Every Saturday, when the normal cartoons finished and the normal kids went off to play, Kukla, Fran and Ollie would present children’s movies from other countries. There was the movie about the fat and skinny Japanese boys, and the English Jewish girl and Catholic boy, the medieval Polish boy who wanted a pair of yellow slippers, the Russian kids who got into trouble just like us even though they were Commies, the French boy and the island of wild horses, etc.
The show was entirely successful in its goal of showing that different cultures could reach each other, the exact opposite of the WTF Eastern Bloc cartoon that Krusty the Klown showed.
I just finished watching a VERY funny Australian film called Children of the Revolution, about Stalin’s love child growing up in Australia. And it has a stellar cast including Judy Davis, Sam Neil, Geoffrey Rush, and F. Murray Abraham as a lovestruck Joseph Stalin.
Marathon from South Korea is one of the funniest, most touching movies I have ever seen. And it’s based on a true story.
Then I’d recommend Red Monarch, a 1983 BBC black comedy about Stalin’s last days: sort of like Animal House set in the Kremlin. And for all its absurdity, based largely on historical fact
Rififi
The Gods Must Be Crazy
If Australia counts, then also Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli, two of my all-time favorite favorites.
You deserve a slap on the back for that…
Concur with both of these, which I’ve only relatively recently seen for the first time, and add Babette’s Feast, which I thought was astonishingly marvelous in its simplicity.
I’m not the one that’s wrong about the time frame.
And
*These killers murdered many innocents who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Your weak rationalization of mass murder kinda puts you in the same camp as those ‘old nazis’; your grievances excuse the commission of the worst crime there is…murder.*
can be applied to the RAF or the USA. Looking at the situation based on the commission of the worst crime there is then there’s no question which side was infinitely more evil, is there?
Dick apparently you know nothing about viet nam, Germany or the RAF.
I have four favorite foreign films:
Breaker Morant, a gripping court-martial drama set during the Boer War. You must see this movie.
Downfall, a chilling portrayal of Hitler’s last days in the bunker.
Pride & Prejudice, a charming retelling of Jane Austen’s classic tale. Keira Knightley is simply luminous; still her best role, I think.
Cinema Paradiso, a winsome ode to the enduring love of cinema, set in a small Italian village. Perhaps I’m a philistine, but I actually think the American theatrical cut is better than the Italian original.
A couple of good, but strange, British movies:
Bronson - a fascinating, and kind of bizarre, biopic of one the UK’s most famous criminals (well, actually, his imprisonment is the source of his fame, not his crimes), starring Tom Hardy.
Moon - a kind of bizarre sci-fi flick starring Sam Rockwell.
Das Boot
Looking over the previous posts, I’ll second the nominations of:
Amelie, a deft, heart-warming comedy about love and kindness.
Headhunters, a fantastic, unpredictable thriller that will mess with your head in the best possible way. (A Hollywood remake is now in the works, of course).
La Femme Nikita, a great spy/assassin action flick.
Run Lola Run, a propulsive thriller about free will, chance and love.
Excalibur, one of the best sword-and-sorcery movies ever. Nicol Williamson steals every scene he’s in as Merlin; shoulda won an Oscar. And look for a young Gabriel Byrne, Patrick Stewart, Ciaran Hinds, Helen Mirren and Liam Neeson in early roles.
The Third Man, a sly postwar-Austria noir mystery with great dialogue and cinematography, and a memorable zither score.
I’ll also add:
Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Japanimation adventure and young love at its best.
And madsircool and Dick Dastardly, do you think you might take your discussion of the Red Army Faction to another thread…?
I’m right about America though?
EDIT: Ah, OK, didn’t see the post above rthis one before I posted.
I’m quite partial to Star Wars.
What? One of us non-Americans had to do it 
Psst. See post 14.