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100 Best Foreign Films (1-10) by Michael Atkinson, Stephen Rebello, David Thomson Movieline, July 1996 Take a video vacation of the spirit and rent these films of rare greatness. Some are austere and challenging, Many are intensely entertaining. All are rewarding respites from the familiar fare of our own culture. L'Age d'Or (1930)/Un Chien Andalou (1928) Luis Bunuel's two semishort surrealist hand grenades (cowritten in varying degrees with Salvador Dali) make a double bill that can restore your faith in the subversions of youth. Pure Spanish-Parisian piss and vinegar. (M.A.) Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) Gonzo German director Werner Herzog goes to the Amazon with the conquistadors in the early 16th century and returns with an unforgettable hallucination of the New World--rusted armor, deadly whirlpools, dying aristocrats and 10,000 monkeys. (M.A.) The American Friend (1977) Wim Wenders doesn't film Patricia Highsmith's splendid Ripley's Game so much as lance the boil to release its rancid inner life. A picture-framer, convinced he's dying and in need of money to leave his wife and child, agrees to assassinate a Mafia man. Steely German skies menace. Everyone lies. Directors Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller make cameo appearances. |
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A Nous la Libert (1931) Two carefree French hoboes meet the modern fortress of industry, searching all the while for freedom and romance. A perfect summer-afternoon movie; afterwards, get a bottle of wine and make love in a field. Chaplin stole from it and got sued for his trouble. (M.A.) Ashes and Diamonds (1958) Andrzej Wajda's vivid gut-wrencher about postwar Poland made an Eastern European James Dean out of Zbigniew Cybulski, whose red-hot, rebel-with-a-cause-so-big-his-head-might-explode resistance fighter refuses to let the war end. Cybulski died under a train nine years later, and a generation of Polish war babies mourn to this day. (M.A.) L'Atalante (1934) Just a couple of awkward newlyweds on a river barge, but Jean Vigo's dreamy movie-poem has the lilt and surreal force of a modern myth. (M.A.) L'Avventura (1960) Ever found sex wanting as your only means of reaching out? Ever wandered in a dead, aimless calm where nothing ever happens? Michelangelo Antonioni knows where you live. After the inexplicable vanishing of her friend on an island, mesmerizingly vacant Monica Vitti attempts a search, gets distracted, and takes up with her friend's old lover instead. How like our lives. (S.R.) |
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Belle de Jour (1967) Marnie Turns a Trick, someone once called this elegantly shocking comedy directed by Luis Bunuel. Catherine Deneuve, in peak form, glides like Hitchcock's coolest blonde through a bizarre series of sex tableaux, scratching her itch for humiliation by servicing bourgeois whorehouse patrons while her blandly hunky husband is off doing surgery. Sadomasochistic role-playing, dressed by Chanel, never looked so radically chic. (S.R.) La Belle et la Bte (1946) Part fairy tale, part Gothic horror, Jean Cocteau's poetry on celluloid is also one of the screen's great erotic tales. As the Beast, the ravishing Jean Marais imprisons porcelain Josette Day's Beauty in his enchanted castle. No wonder she learns to sing in her chains. If you've never seen this unfussily magical movie, you'll be surprised how much of it you recognize--not just because it's been remade by Disney in animated form, but because it's been borrowed and stolen from so extensively. (S.R.) The Bicycle Thief (1947) A poor slob searches for his stolen bike. You can go to other great Vittorio De Sica movies (Miracle in Milan, Shoeshine) for soaring, ragged lyricism and poetry. This one, set among Rome's poor people, losers and crooks, fish-eyes the world with ruthless dispassion and virtually defines Italian neorealism. (S.R.) 100 Best Foreign Films, Part 2 (11-20) |