Academy Award, Best Foreign Language Film

Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film nominee, 1956 - surely someone's seen this?

A very funny sex comedy that unfolds like a farce, in which every character's life intersects with the others', whether they know so or not. Charming film deserving of its Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award nomination in 1989, and a great introduction to Almodovar, who has become one of the seminal directors of our time.

A sentimental gem. No one makes an emotional film better than the Italians do, and among the Italians, I'm wondering if Tornatore's the best. This story - a memory of a small-town childhood and its movie theatre experienced by a now successful man who lives in Rome - is a beautiful one, and the only criticism I can throw at it is that it's all rather normal. Touching slice of life, though, a stirring classic.

High school French class... yeah... or maybe university?? I don't know... I think I'd remember if it was a better movie, but I remember that it didn't suck despite it being a very slow starter.

A film I had long been wanting to watch, wow am I glad I did. In the early going, it takes its stylistic cues from Blake Edwards, et al., a glossy and beautiful comic love story that evokes a sort of Italian Charlie Chaplin and carries on just long enough for you to say "Okay, when will it fall apart, now?"

In the second half, we get a more Spielberg-meets-Bicycle Thieves aesthetic, complete with innocent and skillful child acting and neo-realist shaky cam, and though the film falls a little into Schindler's List territory, it's magical in its way, documenting the amazing dedication of a father to his son, even at arguably the lowest point in human history (the Nazi death camps). The story is spellbinding, the conclusion packs a wallop, and Roberto Benigni is masterful. A classic film that's not to missed - it already feels like it's been in the canon for decades!

It's impossible to make a film like this without a grand vision, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet channels his into an innovative and highly enjoyable film. Audrey Tautou creates such a lovable character, and the story is quirky, touching and thought-provoking without being schmaltzy. Great fun to watch over and over, beautifully shot and well-paced, Amelie rightfully became an instant classic, and is film I should have seen long before now.

A truly outstanding film that leaves you with a great deal to digest. It does have its lulls, but the excellent acting and the double-edged sword that is Arcand's script more than make up for it. To the very end, you don't know who to take seriously and who to dislike, and the end result is a moving experience sprinkled with some of the darker comedy you'll ever see on film. It's a great creator of cynics, and while you may think you get what you want with the ending, you may not want what you got. It's brilliant.

Brave, epic film-making. Hitler was a man, even if he was a monster, and Downfall shows us a human face to the 20th Century's biggest villain. Some would argue that just making this film puts the great dictator up on a pedestal, but at the same time, it's a story worth telling: what would these last days be like?

That being said, I found that the film fell into "historical drama by-the-numbers" territory sometimes. Much like Titanic, no matter how good it might be, you know how it ends, and you're racing there in your mind... even if the film is 2.5 hours long.

The acting is great, and the framing device - using the secretary's perspective to tell the story - was brilliant, and qualified the film in such a way that it could at least shoot back at its detractors. Not as exciting as I might have liked though: maybe because of the many, many parodies of the film's best scene now floating around YouTube.

Saw about half of this a year or two ago, and while very good it was very late at night... I fell asleep. [Real rating pending.]

Intense, borderline claustrophobic, but all along it felt like something was missing in this film... cinematographically fantastic though, and exciting by times, it's worth watching, but it wasn't the fantastic film I'd heard it was. I still liked it, just an expectation problem I suppose. Still a better than average movie, no question.

A film with everything: natural, honest intrigue; freedom of speech questions; a heart-rending love story; a spooky soundtrack; fantastic acting (by Ulrich Muhe), and more. The tension is high from the beginning, and it comes from the institutionalized paranoia that comes with the main character's task: spying and reporting on a writer who, though he's long been a friend to the state, may finally have a reason to go West and speak out. So much comes together in the end of this film, and you won't mind its flashes forward as it wraps up: they're really the only way out. The film is so deep in its moment, you forget that there is a way out, that a society need not operate this way, with surveillance and secret police and what not. An excellent period piece that's essential viewing, one of the best European films I've ever seen.

Visually, this film is amazing, and it has a compelling story that is let out very, very slowly. Brutal in places, not for children, the "adult fairy tale" label fits it quite well - especially the horrific moments befitting the brothers Grimm themselves. A great and chilling escape that I love all the more for the ingrained "Garden of Eden" motifs, a truly original film.

An important film to see if not all that good, just barely socially conscious and iconoclastic enough to overcome its lack of a coherent story. This is very sensitive filmmaking and the acting (particularly the child actor Sarala) is quite good, but the film is hard to watch due to its incredibly slow pacing. Stick with it, the second half is good (until the cop-out ending which I won't spoil), but there's just not enough there to overcome the excessive "build-up" of the first half. A letdown, overall.

I would hardly be the first to compare Nazi concentration camps to Hell, but this film brought to mind an interesting way to do so: the notion of contrapasso, from Dante's Divine Comedy (the first volume, Inferno, if that wasn't obvious).

Quite simply, contrapasso is when the sinner in Hell is punished by having to continually commit his or her sin for eternity... or at least until enough prayers get the spirit out of Hell and into Purgatory and then Paradise.

The lead character, Sally, is a master counterfeiter, both a criminal and a Jew, and as such he finds himself arrested. The punishment, in a Dantean sense, fits the only one of the two qualifications that is actually a crime: the counterfeiter is doomed to continue counterfeiting.

When Dante and Virgil reached the very depths of Hell and discovered Satan, it was not fiery, but effectively frozen solid, and though incredibly powerful, all Satan could do was flap his wings. This is what circulated the air in the Inferno, and effectively kept the whole system moving. The point? In a Dantean world view, even the greatest evil has a role to play in God's plan.

No, I'm not about to defend the Nazis, I hope you didn't stop reading. Like Oskar Schindler, the master counterfeiter Sally is able to keep a staff and thereby save his workers' lives. Much to the chagrin of Burger, another inmate who can't bear the thought of bankrolling the Nazi's war effort, Sally and his crew print forged British Pound and American Dollar notes simply to stay alive. And so, in a larger sense, printing the money - though aiding an evil force - had a benevolent role to play, as it allowed the group to stay alive until the camp was liberated. And Burger, being a deceiver and continually sabotaging the Dollar project just enough to delay them longer, was also a hero despite his seemingly reprehensible actions making him persona non grata by the end.

(Bit of a spoiler, I know, but Holocaust movies are so depressing already, it's almost unheard of to kill the main character... if you watch a lot of them you generally know that they'll survive.)

Other Holocaust films have moved me more (Fateless) or had a bigger/better production values (Schindler's List), but this might be the one of the best plots among those that that I've seen: the contradiction is exciting, as you spend the whole film unsure if you want them to "crack the Dollar" or not, as neither succeeding nor failing guarantees survival. I also found it interesting that the counterfeiters were first artists, for some would argue that to attempt to make a film about the Holocaust in and of itself is, like counterfeiting money, a perversion of artistic talent.

It always blows me away to see a director entertain the notion of what humanity will do when reduced to its basest level of existence, and in this case, it was the flaws of the counterfeiters that made them human, and separated them from the faceless and automatic Nazis.

A well written and acted film that certainly deserved its Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, one that you can either just watch as a good, straight-forward Holocaust movie, or if you want, think a ton about it - the film lends itself to both approches, and should be on your list.

A nuanced, demanding film about small-town secrets that rivals the best stories of Alice Munro or William Faulkner, in which characters' lines are cutting, doom is just around the corner, and the individuals' respective stories continue to surprise as each reveals itself to be related to the others in larger frame, the life of a town (Eichwald) and the narrating school teacher. Great story, well told, and though it's lean (basically, one setting over one year, and a deservedly abrupt ending), there's a lot going on here, plot-wise and meaning-wise, with symbolism and metaphysical engagement to spare. Reminded me, too, of Hitchcock, in that the most horrific is the off-stage stuff, and for a reason that I hope is more than "because it's European and in black and white," Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal... and, though set in pre-WWI Germany, it's a story that has no trouble resonating today because of its (unfortunately) universal subject matter. A worthy Palme d'Or winner that moves slowly but stays captivating all the way. Definitely a film you should see.

Dramatic, well-acted, gripping and shot in a way that really does let the camera tell the story, Incendies has a lot going for it. For me, though, the structure was a bit tedious: see mother go through chapter of her story; watch children track down and learn that part of story; repeat. Every scene was somewhat anti-climactic, as you already knew how it would end. And yet, it was still compelling, and the sad similarity in the juxtaposed protagonist and antagonist - each of whom, in their own way, sell out every last fibre of their belief to survive in wartime - is chilling to say the least. Not a perfect film, but certainly notable, and not just for Canada. Well worth seeing, like a less overtly provocative Michael Haneke piece.