Foreign Movies
Foreign movie reviews of arthouse world cinema from an indie film perspective.
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Las Acacias
Las Acacias, which won the award for best first feature at Cannes in 2011, shows how powerful simplicity can be in a film. Director Pablo Giorgelli takes what sounds like a mawkish premise and strips away any sentimentality or...
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Kidnapped
Very rarely does a film start with so much promise and then go on to waste it all with just a few misguided steps. The new Spanish thriller from director Miguel Angel Vivas, Kidnapped, is that rare film. This...
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Polisse
Polisse, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year, is a very hectic film. Subplots come and go at an alarmingly fast rate, the main cast comprises of almost a dozen characters with each one being focused on...
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Nobody Else But You
Nobody Else But You is a light neo-noir French thriller about a celebrity model that hides behind her famous figure in public while her personal life is crumbing around her. Her sudden death inspires a writer to become a...
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Rapt
Rapt is, if anything, a timely film. It’s been over three years since it was released in France (it came out in theatres stateside last year) but it feels more relevant today. With the demonization of corporations and CEOs...
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Sleepless Night
When I was 11 or 12 the local YMCA started hosting these overnight “lock-ins” where kids could go and do all kinds of things like swimming, and watching cartoons on a giant screen set up in one of the...
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The Double Hour
Some call The Double Hour a foreign art house thriller while I would lean slightly more toward film nior, maybe it’s all of the above. I saw glimpses of Tell No One in this heart pounding Italian thriller from...
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Marianne
It’s hard to criticize a movie like Marianne considering its ambitions. Aside from a few surprises over the years the horror genre has mostly been dead in the water, and Marianne has the balls to try and put more...
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Livide
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out if the new French film Livide is worth the time. I’ve seen the film twice now and my mind is still not made up. The first time I caught...
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Revanche
Revanche is a foreign thriller from director Gotz Spielmann which focuses heavily on the characters than it does with narrative. Unique circumstances bring two separate characters together that allows one to commit a sin and the other is setup...
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Volver
Volver could probably pass as a good Spanish soap opera. The film by talented director Pedro Almodóvar is about a predominantly female family and how they deal with situations that unfold. This melodrama contains all of Almodóvar’s trademarks; female...
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The Raid
The Raid: Redemption could be seen as a slaughterhouse more than an action movie. Calling the plot and characters paper-thin would be an understatement, and the body count only stops rising the moment the credits start rolling. Any other...
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Broken Embraces
Broken Embraces is a foreign film from the highly acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodovar about passion and obsession. The film centers around a filmmaker who falls in love with an actress who is the producer’s mistress. The plot slowly...
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Miss Bala
Miss Bala is Spanish film about how much corruption the Mexican drug wars have. The storyline is engaging the whole time even though there are times it drags a little. Miss Bala was Mexico’s official submission for the Best...
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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a French film based on a true story of an Elle magazine editor that suffers a massive stroke at the age of 43. One of the most terrifying situations I can imagine...
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The Artist
The Artist is a silent black-and-white film by French director Michel Hazanavicius that is easily the most entertaining film of 2011. Essentially, it is a silent film about silent films. The film benefits from being made in modern times...
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Tyrannosaur
Tyrannosaur is the first feature film by actor Paddy Considine (Submarine) who switched up his traditional role for writer and director on this film. It is a dark look into a lonely man whose life is filled with drinking...
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Circumstance
Circumstance is an indie foreign film written and directed by Maryam Keshavarz, about two teenage girls who are in love but are forced to live under circumstances of modern-day Tehran, Iran where that is forbidden. While the premise sounds...
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The Kid with a Bike
The Kid with a Bike is an independent French film written and directed by brothers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne about an abandoned adolescent boy who refuses to believe his father has left him. Doing everything he can to...
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The Skin I Live In
The Skin I Live In is a psychological thriller from the highly acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. His work is often compared to Alfred Hitchcock’s and it is easy to see why. Even though it was shot and...
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Lady Vengeance
Chan-wook Parks‘s Lady Vengeance is the third and last installment of the “Vengeance Trilogy”, which are all linked by theme only not literal sequels. Nearly the entire first half of the film is spent trying to understand the main...
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Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is Park Chan-wook’s first installment of his “Vengeance Trilogy”, followed by the near masterpiece of a Oldboy and the last installment being “Lady Vengeance”. None of the films are literal sequels of one another but...
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City of God
Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles created possibly the most compelling foreign crime drama to date with City of God. It is based on actual events of the life of Wilson Rodriguez who is a famous Brazilian photographer. The storyline is...
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Fish Tank
Fish Tank is a British film done by Andrea Arnold who wrote and directed it. The story is peppered with characters all of which share the major flaw of poor decision making. The main character is a young female...
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Oldboy
Oldboy is a powerful Korean film that is as mesmerizing as it is disturbing. It is one that would not be able to be distributed in America because of the nature of it’s sexuality and violence. It is about...
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13 Assassins
The director Takashi Miike, who may be most famous for directing the horror film Audition, is the director of this epic samurai period film. 13 Assassins is set in 1844 toward the end of the Edo era that Tokyo...
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Last Train Home
Last Train Home is a documentary by Lixin Fan that follows a family of factory workers over the course of three years and shows the struggle between factory life and family life in China. The film starts off saying,...
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Incendies
Incendies is a French Canadian film directed and written by Denis Villeneuve, which was adapted from a play by Wajdi Mouawad. The film, whose title is translated to Scorched, is a dual narrative about siblings uncovering their families past...
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A Prophet
A Prophet (Un prophete) is a French gangster film set in a prison divided largely by Corsicans and Arabs in a fight for power. Director Jacques Audiard gives a gritty and authentic look at prison life and that is...
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Dogtooth
Dogtooth is disturbing anti-social satire that is shot in an art-house sort of way. After the conclusion of most films, you can form an opinion fairly soon after the final credits roll. But there are some films that are...