What's a really good foreign movie that you've seen recently?

I recently watched Ghostbusters again.

I haven’t watched it yet but I just recently DVR-ed the original (French) version of La Cage. I haven’t seen it for years but remember how much I liked it.

The SO and I have been on a quest to watch the highest rated movies based upon various opinions. Here are a few foreign films that meet my (US) standards:
* Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
* Ikiru
* Life is Beautiful
* Seven Samurai
* Metropolis

All were seen at home, either on Netflix, on the computer, or on CD.

There’s a fabulous Spanish crime drama called The Secret in Their Eyes

One of the most satisfying yet unsettling endings I’ve seen in a long time.

I think we found it in Redbox a while back. It was a deviation from the horror/Gore/hyperviolence foreign films we usually watch. Haha

The German films “The Lives of Others” and “Goodbye Lenin”

Anything by Mike Leigh

Italian “The Night of Shooting Stars” – one of my favorites.

The Book Thief, was excellent. It’s a British-German production about a girl who spends yer adolescence as a foster child in a village before and during the Nazi regime. Her mother, a Communist, was disappeared into the camps, her father was shot and this childless couple take her in through a state program. But that’s not what the story is about, that’s just the background and milieu from a child’s point of view. The story is about human kindness, emotional survival, and tenacity in adversity. It’s a really good film with a very poignant ending.

Fatal Deviation was an Irish made Kung-Fu movie that was so bad it has achieved an almost cult status. It is one of the best movies I’ve had the pleasure of mocking.

The Three Colours Trilogy by Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski.

I watched Life is Beautiful the other day, at home on one of my many movie channels.

I Vitelloni, considered by many to be Fredrico Fellini’s best film ever. It will be shown on Turner Classic Movies at 2 am Eastern tonight.

I’ve just finished Rififi. I’ve watched some old French noir recently and they seems to be very abstract, sometimes even hard to understand. So I was quite surprised that this movie wasn’t so hard. It incorporated elements of both the “abstract” French noir and American noir. The movie stayed realistic while still maintain the abstract beauty. I’ve seen movies that try to be visually beautiful but drop the plot and vice versa. This movie did both and succeeded.

The Intouchables was pretty terrific. It’s a French movie about the relationship between a quadriplegic and a caregiver who is out of his element.

Victoria. A German movie shot in one continuous take over 2 hours and 20 minutes. No editing, no cutaways, one camera only that never stopped shooting.

It was so engrossing that one becomes almost integrated into the action.

Thank you. I’m interested in everything that I might add to my Netflix queue. I see a lot of foreign movies, at least one every week or so. Lately I’ve seen movies in Danish, Japanese, French, Kurdish, Farsi, German, Korean, Russian, Hebrew, and Italian. Even when dubbing is an option, I always do subtitles so I can hear the original actors’ voices and delivery. I also enjoy hearing the sounds and rhythms of another language.

One of the very best that I’ve seen recently was a rare five-star selection that I saw last night, called Tangerines. It’s in Estonian—beyond any doubt my first Estonian movie. Beautifully done: script (insofar as I could judge it), directing, acting, cinematography, everything. My husband and I both thought we could predict the outcome, and we were completely wrong. It showed us how conditioned we are to lapse into Hollywood cliches and how great an impact a film can have when it altogether avoids them. The theme of “us and them” and what that really means resonates in all kinds of ways.

Another one that I liked a lot was As It Is in Heaven, in Swedish, with Michael Nyqvist.

One of my current interests is Japanese cinema. I’ve gone through all of Kurosawa that’s available on DVD and am now working my way through Ozu. I know The Seven Samurai is considered Kurosawa’s masterpiece, but I think Ikiru is his best work.

Journey to the West

@Jeruba I loved As it is in Heaven!!!

Right now, my mom and I are watching a very good Spanish series on Netflix called Gran Hotel(TV_series) that is kind of a cross between Downton Abbey and a romantic/spy/murdermystery, if you can imagine such a thing.

We saw The Imitation Game with Benedict Cumberbatch about 6 months ago. That was really good.

A very good Netflix series with a similar theme as the above movie^^ is Bletchley Circle with an excellent, mostly female, ensemble cast.

Before that, we saw a gorgeous foodie’s delight called The Hundred Foot Journey with Helen Mirren.

One of my favorite movies, this is from 2011 so not too recent, but definitely worth seeing is The Trip with Steve Coogan. Note: the first 5 or 10 minutes is kind of slow, but it’s worth it after that. Some of it is very melancholy, there are some extremely funny parts, and there is lots of gorgeous British scenery.

If you haven’t seen the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, I highly recommend it/them. We saw both the Swedish and British version(s). I actually preferred the scenery in the British version, but the acting was superb in both versions.

And now we’re hooked a another Netflix series, set in the 1920’s in Australia, about a gorgeous, liberated woman of (unknown to us yet) means who inadvertently ends up as an amateur crime solver, along with a handsome, but reluctant (reluctant to hook up with her) Police Inspector Detective. This is a really great ensemble show, with some very good sexual tension coming from not just the lead characters. The outfits worn by the female lead alone are worth the watch. It’s called The Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries

This 11 minute short film turns me into a basket case.
El Ladrón de Caras (The face thief)

It gets even better when you watch it a second time and fully understand what is happening.

I recently watched “What We Do in the Shadows,” a New Zealand documentary-style comedy about vampires who are flatmates together. It is the funniest movie I have seen in years!

Oops, I guess I missed the requirement that the movie be in a language not my own. Still recommend it though.

@trolltoll Oh dear, I’m afraid I missed that language part too, although for all of the British shows we watch, we turn on the (not subtitles, because it’s already in “English”) the closed captioning. It makes it much easier to understand, because there is often a lot of dialect that is not used in U.S. English.

The original Shall We Dance (The Japanese version) is much funnier than the American version.

The Way Home(2002_film) was a very good Korean film. It has parts that are extremely heart-wrenching though, but some of it is very funny and sweet.

Although there are parts of this movie that are clearly impossible, this Korean film called Innocent Steps was a very nice, sweet movie about a young woman who moves from China to be the dance partner of a Korean ballroom dancer. There are a few misunderstandings along the way, and of course, a budding romance.

I have a good friend from Japan, and she shows me DVDs from her nation. One I recall is “High Kick Girl” starring Rina Takeda as a girl who attends a dojo whose sensei is very strict, so she only has a brown belt. She goes around to other dojos and challenges men with black belts and beats them. Then, she takes their black belts and has quite a large collection of hem.

The animated film “The Breadwinner” takes place in Afghanistan, but is a film from Canada. Still, it’s portrayal of life in Afghanistan is remarkable. A very fine film.