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100 Best Foreign Films (41-50) The Golden Coach (1952) Jean Renoir loved actors and the notion that acting was just a metaphor for life. He was also drawn to the subject of whether an artist or an actor can lead a real life--as opposed to following his calling. This is the enactment of those thoughts, with Anna Magnani as the woman in a troupe of traveling players, loved by so many, yet, finally, incapable of loving people as much as she loves her work. (D.T.) The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) Pier Paolo Pasolini's cinema verite-style life of Christ features a cranky Jesus, the ferocious beauty of Southern Italy and a freaked-out, eclectic musical score with a little Prokofiev, a little Bach. A nifty, iconoclastic antidote to the cheeseball, velvet Jesus piety of The Greatest Story Ever Told. (S.R.) Ikiru (1952) The word means "to live," but a petty bureaucrat discovers he is dying of cancer. He searches for company and meaning. This is somber, plain and everyday, but the realism is lit up by the performance of Takashi Shimura and the sympathy of director Akira Kurosawa. A movie to be seen after any one of those American epics involving massive, spectacular and inhuman slaughter. (D.T.) |
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Le Jour Se Lve (1939) Why is Jean Gabin holed up in a room with a gun? He has done a murder. Why? Because the world is rotten and hopeless. Director Marcel Carne's 1939 (all made in the studio) is different from Renoir's 1939 (The Rules of the Game, shot mostly on location). Starring two epitomes of worldliness--Arletty and Jules Berry. (D.T.) Jules and Jim (1961) Boys meet girl. Boys love girl. One boy gets girl, then loses her. Other boy tries for girl. And so on, and so on. There's rarely been a wiser movie about unspoken love among messy, self-indulgent bohemians--or about love, period. Jeanne Moreau's Catherine is extraordinary: captivating, crackers, inspiring, tyrannical. Francois Truffaut's romantic masterpiece lives a universe apart from Paul Mazursky's Americanized version, Willie and Phil. The Kingdom (1994) Lars von Trier's gruesome, poetic four-and-a-half hour movie (it was a miniseries in Denmark) about a haunted Danish hospital is a stinging rejoinder to anyone who says long foreign films are no fun. (M.A.) Lamerica (1994) Neo-neorealist Gianni Amelio takes an irascible Italian yuppie and strands him in Albania, one of the most fabulously desolate and fearsome countries in the world and home to three-and-a-half million people who seem to want nothing more than to get the hell out. A political movie with a throbbing, panicky, bloody human heart. (M.A.) |
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Landscape in the Mist (1988) Two children wander across the Greek industrial wastelands to find an irrevocably lost father. Theo Angelopoulos's awesome, devastating movies make you hold your breath for fear of missing a frame; this one could change your life. (M.A.) Last Year at Marienbad (1961) Or was it Friedrichsbad? In Alain Resnais's enigma wrapped in an enigma--the visuals are like a 93-minute Calvin Klein commercial where no one's trying to sell you anything--gorgeous, ghostly sleepwalkers float through the hallways, lounges and restaurants of the grandest of grand hotels. Giorgio Albertazzi, for instance, can't remember whether, or even where, he and sleek Delphine Seyrig had an affair. Silly boy, with a face and trendsetting haircut like Seyrig's, who could possibly forget? (S.R.) Lola (1961) A fairy-tale romance, but filmed in the gritty realism of Nantes, the seaport where director Jacques Demy grew up. It's a tribute to Max Ophuels, and a hymn to Anouk Aimee, as well as to comic irony, coincidence, wide screen, black and white and the sheer radiance of cinema. (D.T.) 100 Best Foreign Films, Part 6 (51-60) |