For me, it’s Tampopo, a Japanese comedy about a noodle shop.
So many, many choices.
The first one that pops to mind today is Truffaut’s Day for Night. (Which isn’t really the English translation of it’s original title: La Nuit américaine or The American Night.)
Gives the inside view of the making a Truffaut film.
“Making a film is like a stagecoach ride in the old west. When you start, you are hoping for a pleasant trip. By the halfway point, you just hope to survive.”
I’ve gotta go with Cinema Paradiso.
Sweet movie, and it reminds me of a great time in my life.
Well, Tampopo is certainly up there for me, maybe in my top ten or fifteen?
I love Luis Bunuel, so my choice would be the surreal and extremely comical The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeousie (1972), if not Jean Renoir’s WWI film La Grande Illusion (1937).
My favourite is Le dîner de cons (The Dinner Game), a superb French farce. It’s about a group of rich French businessmen who make a sport of inviting bores and cranks over for dinner, and about the comeuppance one of them gets. There is scarcely a more perfect comedy.
At the risk of ignoring the thread premise of a single favorite film (I have a hard time picking a single favorite anything) I’ll list a few.
My credibility would probably be helped if I listed deadly serious movies, and there are examples I can think of (movies by Kurosawa, or Yasujirō Ozu, or Zhang Yimou, for example) but I’m much more often in a mood to rewatch the lighter movies than the heavy, serious ones, so the list is going to lean towards those.
I’ll lead with Katsuhito Ishii’s Naisu no Mori/Funky Forest just because the whole thing is watchable on Youtube. Also by Ishii The Taste of Tea, which isn’t.
Other Japanese favorites include Night Time Picnic, Swing Girls, Summer Time Machine Blues, Bounce Ko Gals, and (skipping the well-known Ghibli films) Tokyo Godfathers and Summer Wars.
Korean movies include Lovely Rivals, My Sassy Girl, The Bow, and The Host.
10 Canoes is my favorite movie in Yolŋu Matha (well, it is the only movie I’ve seen in Yolŋu Matha.) A guilty pleasure French film is Wasabi. For Dutch I’ll go with the Tempelriddernes skat trilogy.
(And I’ll stop rambling now.)
Hm, so many choices. Up high would be Amelie, the most feel-good movie ever, and Princess Mononoke, about a genuine and apparently-irreconcilable conflict between two good factions.
Or, wait, does Fantasia count? The only vocals are in Latin.
This one:
Closely followed by **this one**:Don’t have a lot of them on my resume, but probably was most impressed by Alexander Nevsky, which got removed from distribution in 1939 when Hitler and Stalin were making nice (it was re-released in 1941).
I think anyone who has seen the French film documentary Night and Fog hasn’t forgotten it. I sure haven’t.
I agree. Here are ones I especially like (in no particular order):
Betty Blue
Das Boot
Ran
Rashomon
Seven Samurai
EDIT: OK, it looks like they happen to be in alphabetical order. Not intentional.
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Peking Opera Blues
Picked the two (Das Boot and Rashomon) I thought of off the top of my head. Add Metropolis, Burnt By The Sun, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and The Lives of Others. Besson’s La Femme Nikita was a guilty pleasure.
Hmmmmm…I was WONDERING if silent movies counted, since you just change the title cards to distribute in other languages.
I would also go for Metropolis, plus Paul Wegener’s starkly Expressionist Der Golem (1920), because when the cast and crew broke for lunch, everyone talked German.
Damn…AND Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). My Criterion copy has the original French title cards plus subtitles in English.
:smack: I forgot about La Femme Nikita. And Delicatessen.
Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire)
Dom za vešanje (Time of The Gypsies)
La double vie de Véronique
Antonia
Babettes gæstebud
Cinema Paradiso was the first one I thought of. I also really like Let The Right One In.
Breathless (1959)
Death in the Garden (1956)
Swordsman II (1992)
Babettes Feast???
I want that playing as I lay dying because that 2 hours seemed like days. 