The Road Home, directed by Zhang Yimou
It’s an exceptionally beautiful, gentle, moving love story from China. Perhaps the best straightforward love story I’ve ever seen. It’s set in a small country village in about the 1960s.
Trailer
Dayum! Comprehensive AND irrefutable.
Nice choice to throw La Belle et La Bete in there. Cinematographic masterpiece (even if the acting is a bit wobbly sometimes :D), and Battle of Algiers was a good call too, that one probably would have slipped my mind.
I would like to second this list while also adding a few;
La Voyage Dan La Lune (Trip to the Moon) (1902), Georges Melies
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), Robert Wiene
The Seventh Seal (1957), Ingmar Bergman <– I could have gone with Persona but the Mid 60s has a lot of hats in the ring, so I went with this masterpiece in which a knight plays Cluedo, Battleship and Twister against death… the stakes? His very life…
Yojimbo (1961), Akira Kurosawa
8 1/2 (1963), Federico Fellini
Woman of the Dunes (1964), Hiroshi Teshigahara
Sedmikrasky (Daisies) (1966), Vera Chytilova
Weekend (1967), Jean-Luc Godard
La Planete Sauvage (Fantastic Planet) (1973), Rene Laloux
Kanashimi No Beradonna (Belladonna of Sadness) (1973), Eiichi Yamamoto
Akira (1988), Katsuhiro Otomo
La Cite des Enfants Perdus (City of Lost Children) (1995), Jean-Pierre Juenet, Marc Caro
Funny Games (1997), Michael Haneke
Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Hayao Miyazaki
and there’s still a whole bunch of blanks to fill, and probably one or two things I glaringly forgot to include…
Lol, just saw this… nice.
“They melvined me.”
Off the top of my head:
Italian: “Cinema Paradiso”, “Life is Beautiful”
German: “Das Boot”
Japanese: “Seven Samurai”, “Yojimbo”, “Harakiri”
Sweden: “A Man Called Ove”
French: “The Tall Blonde Man with One Black Shoe”
UK: “Snatch”, “Trainspotting” (If I need subtitles to understand, I consider it “foreign language” 
Oh, also Fanny and Alexander.
Grave of the Fireflies
Also, a Yiddish film Fishka der Krimmer (a.k.a. The Light Ahead)
Explain, please. As far as I can tell, this is just a couple of lunatics terrorizing and brutalizing an innocent family for no reason. What do you think makes it a great film?
Agreed. I made it a point to watch/rewatch 10 Bergman films in 2016, finishing with Fanny and Alexander. It’s a daunting film for length, but it operates as something of a Bergman Thesaurus, subtly referencing his body of work.
Well there’s no accounting for how far people can tell… That question actually very, very easy to answer. What makes the film good is that it is an excruciatingly intelligent commentary on how an audience compartmentalizes different kinds of violence, particularly violence directed at “us” vs violence directed at “them”. The whole movie is building up to one moment when the mother shoots one of the terrorists, with the expectation that the audience will erupt with joy, only for the main psychopath in the film (and the director) to “rewind” that part of the film and take the audience’s “satisfying violence” away from them and remind them that violence is only ever horrible.
You know for art to be good, sometimes it needs to be confrontational, jarring and uncomfortable. Painful, even. I hated every moment of watching Funny Games, but that does nothing to diminish its intelligence or its purpose. Let’s just say the point of the film didn’t go over my head. I did consider walking out around the midway point, before I knew where the director was going with it, but ultimately my patience was rewarded. It shook my nerves and it rattled my brain, and it made me hate humanity and pity humanity and ultimately yield to my compassion for humanity. Maybe you need to be a certain kind of person to understand the point. But I got it.
If “great film” just meant “films that indulge what I find entertaining and only ever affirm my own sensibilities” then great films would never make you think or force you to grow or really do anything worthwhile. They’d just be a pat on the back at 24 frames per second. What’s even the point in that case? Something can be a horrifying experience, but as long as it’s not banal or vapid and any gratuitousness ultimately serves a point, it may just turn out to be brilliant.
Have you seen the film? Cause as far as I can tell ‘Funny Games’ has a lot of things going on behind the surface. I’d never watch it more than once though, maybe I’d watch it again just to keep someone company who is watching it for the first time. But one scan through was enough for me to get the point (even that is part of its greatness).
So, that’s that question answered, and now my only advice if anyone hasn’t seen it and is thinking about doing so is brace yourself, don’t expect a good time, if you start watching it keep watching until the end otherwise you really have punished yourself for no reason. Maybe show it to a friend if you think they have the courage to see it through and the brains to get the point, and either way make sure you have Disney’s ‘Aladdin’ on standby and ready to go once the film is over, because you will need a palate cleanser and you will have very hurt feelings.
Thanks for the explanation. Yes, I’ve seen the film. I get that a film can be great even if you don’t agree with its message, or even if its purpose isn’t to entertain you but to make a certain point. In this case, the filmmaker’s point was evidently lost on me, and I disliked it intensely enough that I’m not about to watch it again just to catch what I missed.
Yeah, if you missed it the first time probably just better to have it explained to you. I think that’s why my brain forced itself to get the point on the first go “Ooooooh I don’t wanna have to go through this again”.
Anyway, glad my explanation was obviously understood, sorry if my rant about the purpose of art was redundant, just needed to incorporate the function of art into my argument for the validity of the film. Also upon re-reading what I wrote I hope you don’t feel like I was insinuating that you are not intelligent enough to get it. Was trying to underline that it may only speak coherently to certain types of people, in the sense that my opinions on violence already primed me for the message I was about to receive. So in a twisted and unpleasing way I think maybe an element of confirmation bias was at play where the film articulated something that I had been thinking about lots in a post September 11 world. This is what I meant when I said “maybe it takes a certain type of person to get this film” or whatever I said… I’m paraphrasing myself now. But anyway, just wanted to clarify that, and hopefully you can appreciate that the film was trying to do something more than be gratuitous, even if it failed to do so for you.
Also if I could edit my list I would put “*WARNING: DO NOT WATCH THIS FILM” next to ‘Funny Games’.
The Intouchables is one that I’ve recommended to many and even though it is exactly what you expect, the actors nail it perfectly and you feel for every piece of the puzzle and every person involved.
Inadequate People (Russia, 2011)
Amores perros (Mexico, 2000)
Marriage Italian Style (Italia, 1964)
Barfuss (Germany, 2005)
Not at all. I think your explanation was very lucid, with the bits about the purpose of art providing the necessary context.
Awesome, I have no problem drilling my point home, but sometimes I feel like I gotta step back and check that I’m not hurting or insulting anyone in the process. Glad we’re both on the same page.
Btw, Psychonauts, Grim Fandango and Day Of The Tentacle are three of my all time favourite videogames. Not sure if your handle is a reference but Tim Schaffer is excellent.
La Strada. Seven Samurai. (Same year, I think)
I get asked that a lot, but no, I don’t really play console games—my use of the handle long predates the game you’re talking about.
Although Pan’s Labyrinth may have stolen the top spot in my heart, there’s one that I’ve long treasured and have seen more than any other movie (except Rocky Horror which doesn’t count): City of Lost Children. It’s the trippier cousin of Delicatessen and Amelie, made by the same director.
I have only seen the 5+ hour version, do you think I’d lose anything by going to the shorter one? And what other Bergman film would you suggest next?, that’s the only one I’ve seen.
Speaking of five-hour film versions, the cobbled-together The Kingdom* (from the 13-episode mini-series) is a fun Lars von Trier romp.
This sucker for Rene Soutendyk from thirty years ago gets recommendations for The Fourth Man (total howl) and the down and dirty Spetters (not Bergman, but RS is still healthy for the eyeballs.)
:pNo love for Salo?
*awesome typo - I originally typed “Kingdome”…yeah! Nothin like an acerbic Danish satire on probably the shittiest-looking stadium ever built.