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100 Best Foreign Films (51-60) Lola Montes (1955) Near death, the great 19th-century adventuress and courtesan Lola Montes sold herself to the circus as an attraction. This movie uses her circus act as a framework, and so Montes appears in tableaux from her life, allowing flashbacks to the past. This leads to a superb portrait of the struggle between love (or liberty) and confinement (or destiny). The last film--in CinemaScope--by the unrivaled Max Ophuels. (D.T.) M (1931) Fritz Lang's famous prenoir creeper is one of the earliest and most profoundly compassionate serial killer thrillers ever made. Sixty years before Hannibal Lecter, Peter Lorre gave us a classic self-loathing, compulsive child slayer. (M.A.) Masculin-Feminin (1966) Jean-Luc Godard's disarmingly sweet, intimate and blazingly smart exploration of The Mating Game. Even if the name Godard makes your temples pound, this movie can charm its way right up your leg. (M.A.) |
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Metropolis (1926) Lang's antiquated vision of a dystopia ripped up at the roots by class warfare may not be sophisticated politics, but the sci-fi images of mob conduct and architectural madness remain unsurpassed. It's been plundered so often that even if you haven't seen it, you've sort of seen it. So really see it. (M.A.) Le Million (1931) Rene Clair loved prettiness, song and music, comic confusion and Paris--they are all here in this delicious confection about young lovers in search of a winning lottery ticket. (D.T.) Murmur of the Heart (1971) Louis Malle's sunny, beautifully controlled comedy about the sensual coming-of-age of a 14-year-old, jazz-obsessed boy radiates the knowing, worldly sensuality of a good Colette yarn. The controversy at the time of the film's release about the theme of "incest" was pure flapdoodle--this is not what the movie's about. Still, Lord help sons if all mothers were as gorgeous and blithely sensual as Lea Massari. (S.R.) Napolˇon (1927) An eye-roasting epic of the type even David Lean never made. Abel Gance used every filmmaking trope in the book and then invented a few of his own. Keep an eye peeled for surrealist nutcase Antonin Artaud as Marat. (M.A.) |
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Night and Fog (1955) Yes, you've heard already--the concentration camps were a bad thing. But Alain Resnais's documentary on Auschwitz is only 31 minutes--so you can make time. (D.T.) The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's wonder-working paisan fable about a platoon of Italian peasants in the last days of WWII escaping their ravaged village in the night and searching for the liberating American forces. Filled with those lyrical, meaning-packed moments you could grow old, die and turn to dust waiting to see in American movies. (M.A.) 1900 (1977) This is Bernardo Bertolucci's War and Peace, Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda and Donald Sutherland amid Italy's political vomitings from the beginning of the century to the ill-fated rise of communism, all shot like a Flemish painting and laid out like a Parmesan wedding banquet. (M.A.) 100 Best Foreign Films, Part 7 (61-70) |