Top 5 most entertaining foreign films of the last decade

Most Entertaining Foreign Films of The Last Decade

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This is a list of the foreign language movies that we enjoyed the most over the years starting from 1997 – 2006. Almost all of these have gone on to become cult classics and have had a certain degree of success beyond the boundaries of their own countries. There might have been other more entertaining foreign language movies released during the same period that our readers might have enjoyed more. We may not have even seen some of them and would definitely like to know about them. So please feel free to contribute your own list in your comments.

5. Kung Fu Hustle (China - 2004)

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We selected this movie to be in our list because it is very seldom that a madcap comedy is universally accepted by both critics and public alike. The movie absolutely gets you with its hilarity and leaves you with a silly grin on your face almost throughout its length (when you are not rolling over in your seats that is).

It is about a group of poor people living in a rundown neighborhood called the Pig Sty Alley in 1930s Shanghai. They are ruled over by a domineering landlady who always has a cigarette in her mouth. Shanghai is terrorized by the Axe Gang who does not give much attention to Pig Sty alley because they are too poor. But because of the actions of two aspiring gang members, the Axe Gang storm the alley bringing them into conflict with the people in the alley (some of whom have a few kung fu masters with extraordinary powers).

The sequence of events that follows is a mild excuse to completely loose all perception of reality. The director Simon Chow pulls out all the stops and doesn’t let small things like the gravity or any of the other laws physics stand in the way of hilarious action sequences. None of the actions sequences are real and are made deliberately over the top with the aid of CGI effects. But it lends a riotous humor to the entire proceeding. The movie is also spoof on other more famous movies with parodies of everything from Spiderman to the Untouchables to the Matrix to the Roadrunner being highlighted. A good watch anytime… any number of times.

4. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (Taiwan - 2000)

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This Ang Lee film is the exact opposite of what Kung Fu hustle was all about. It was this movie that changed the way martial arts movies are shot and viewed. The movie has a method to its action and none of it is madcap or over the top. Yes it does have stunts which seem to defy the law of physics but it is more operatic than anything you might have ever seen before.

The story is about the life of its three main characters; Li Mu-bai, Yu Shu-lien and Jen Yu in 18th century China. Li Mu-bai seeks to avenge the murder of his master. He is so obsessed with vengeance that he has even put on hold his love for Yu Shu-lien. Yu Shu-lien has been a warrior all her life and now seeks to settle down. Jen Yu is the daughter of the local governor, destined for an arranged marriage. But she has a secret love affair with a dacoit and yearns for a life of adventure and mastery in martial arts.

The movie is about all three characters trying to search for something which they do not have. The movie is able to highlight the human emotions beyond all the action and the protagonist’s desperation for another life. They are all trying to break free from some bond or the other that is tying them down to their current life. Even the action sequences are graceful and aesthetic to the core. The chase sequence over the roof tops and fight sequence on top of trees is especially unforgettable.

3. Amélie (France - 2001)

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Amélie came at a time when feel good movies were being overused and were becoming over emotional. But Amélie got it just right and makes your heart brighten up for a whole day. This quirky, charming tale of a lonely and mischievous young girl in Paris will definitely touch even the most hardest of hearts.

Amélie as a child grew up without knowing love or affection and was lonely on most parts. Her loneliness helps her to cultivate an active imagination. After she grows up the news of Princess Diana’s death completely changes her life. It causes her to notice a little boy’s box wedged under a loose tile in her apartment. She tries to return it to its owner making a deal with herself in the process: if she finds him and it makes him glad, she will devote her life to goodness. She continues to do good for others after seeing the positive effect of her deed on the man. However she finds herself lonely and sad. She has a chance at happiness when she meets a young man called Nino. Whether she will be able to overcome her shyness and find love forms the rest of the movie.

Amélie is a movie of instant gratification and it is difficult to not fall in love with the title character. The most exciting part of the movie is that Amélie never chooses to help others in a direct way. She leaves clues and mysteries for them to solve and find their own happiness. The other striking feature is Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet exaggerated treatment of the visuals. Overall it is a great movie watch on a rainy night with your lover.

2. Life is beautiful (Italy - 1997)

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The greatness of Life is Beautiful is its theme itself. It is about smiling in the face of adversity and going on when there is no hope of success. It is a timeless tale of hope and courage directed by it main lead Roberto Benigni.

Life is beautiful is a movie of two parts. The first part is about Guido’s courting and subsequent marriage to Dora. This is definitely much lighter and comical than the later half. It serves nothing more than to entice a few laughs and to set the background for the main characters. But the second half completely changes the mood and occurs five years after Guido’s and Dora’s marriage. Guido and his son are whipped off into concentration camps in fascist Italy as they are Jews. His wife too follows suit despite her not being a Jew due to her desire to be near her family. From then on the movie is about how Guido tries to protect his son from the terrible realities at the labor camp by claiming that it is all part of an elaborate game.

Life is beautiful is poignant and charming at the same time. Guido is able to keep up the ruse of the game in part due to his own enterprise and in part due to his son’s innocence. He shows tremendous courage and heart in creating an environment conducive to his son even when all hope is lost. He fights the cruelty with the only weapon he has: laughter. It is the touching tale of a father’s fight to make his son’s life as beautiful as he can.

1. City of God (Brazil - 2002)

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City of god is the name of a slum in Rio de Janeiro. And after watching this movie we feel that it is the most undeserving name given to his place. The events that we see in this movie mostly take place over a few decades in this slum. The absolute godlessness in the events and life of the slum shock you enormously.

It is the story of two boys growing up in the City of God; Rocket and Little Dice. While both of them grows up among violence and are witnesses to absolute brutality from a very young age, they both take different paths in their life as they grow up. While Little Dice becomes Little Zeke, the head of one of the most violent gangs in the neighborhood, Rocket goes on to pursue his passion for photography and eventually becomes a photographer for the local newspaper.

The most impressive aspect of the movie is its narrative style. The movie starts off near to the end of the story and goes of in different tangents before culminating at the same point from which it started off. The other thing that really hits you is the sheer violence and brutality of the movie. What makes it even more poignant and sad is the fact that criminals and gang members are very young boys who are barely into their teen. The movie by Director Fernando Meirelles is both shocking and mesmerizing at the same time.

The Star Maker

The darker magic of cinema

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Giuseppe Tornatore burst into the limelight globally with his Cinema Paradiso in 1989. The start maker is one of his later works released in 1995 and was nominated for the best foreign language film academy awards in the same year. Cinema Paradiso was a nostalgic movie about the pains of growing up and the magic of cinema. It invited you all to come and fall in love with the movies. However the Star Maker showcases the darker side of being enthralled with the magic of cinema.

The movie is about Joe Morelli or Dr. Morelli as he calls himself. Morelli claims to be a talent scout for a big studio in Rome. He travels around small towns and villages of Sicily in the aftermath of World War II, promising to film the auditions of anyone and everyone who has 1500 lire to give as fee. All anyone who is interested in making big has to do is go to his tent, pay the money and enact a scene from ‘Gone with the Wind’. Morelli claims that he will sent the audition films to studio executives who would then get back to the individual whom they have selected. As he says repeatedly, he is not making any promises. But he gets the Sicilians hook, line and sinker when he gives off a list of famous actors whom he claims to have discovered.

The effect of the dream of making it big in the film world is huge among the townspeople. The townsfolk react to Morelli’s arrival as if the circus had arrived. There are large crowds around his tent who dream of the big salary and fame of making it big in the movie world. But most of the people don’t have the talent or the literacy to enact a scene from ‘Gone with the Wind’. So they begin to talk about their personal lives on camera which borders on confession.

Morelli however is a self centered man who is only interested in being remunerated for his efforts. He even takes sexual favors from a woman who doesn’t have enough money to pay for her daughter’s audition. He however begins to change when he meets a beautiful young teenage orphan called Beata. She scrubs floors at various homes and offices in town. To obtain the 1500 lire for the screen test, she strips naked in front of a local bigwig. Morelli however is taken in by the girl’s story as well as her naivety and begins to have feelings for her. She wants to travel with Morelli and get out of her present life. She believes that by making it big in the movies she will have a better life. Morelli falls in love with her and takes her along with him on his travels.

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Just when we think that Morelli has turned a new leaf, it is revealed that Morelli is in fact a fraud and fake. He was doing nothing more than selling dreams to the poor impoverished people of Sicily. From then on the movie takes a darker turn and how this revelation eventually affect the lives of both Morelli and Beata forms the rest of the movie.

I loved this movie because of the slow change in the mood of the movie. It starts off as a light hearted and sometimes poignant comedy. The confessions of various people who come and sit in front of the camera are quite funny in the beginning. Then the mood slowly changes as the movie moves along and we hear some really touching confessions. It again changes when Beata come into the picture. Her innocence and naivety makes you sympathize with her plight and makes you want to protect her. But what really shook me was the climatic portions of the movie when both Beata and Morelli’s life becomes depressingly tragic.

Tornatore shows the beauty of Sicily as well as the ugliness in the hearts of men in this movie. He shows tremendous skill in a scene which has silhouette-saturated shots of Morelli inside his tent after dark. In my opinion he gets the pacing of the movie just right and I found it thoroughly enjoyable to watch. But what really impressed me is that there was no redemption for Morelli even at the end unlike some of the Hollywood or Bollywood movies that I have seen in the past. His sins catch up with him and he is forced to suffer the consequences.

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The last sequence of shots where Morelli looks back sees all the confession that he had ‘filmed’ in his mind. All those confessions which we found to be comic earlier now take a whole new meaning. We watch it with a lump in our throat as we realize the true meaning of what the Police Officer who caught him, himself a victim of Morelli’s con, tells him, “Everybody confessed to you. They gave you their soul and perhaps they will never again. And you didn't understand a thing. They trusted you Morelli, and so did I. But all you wanted was money.” The sequence of shots reminded me of Tornatore’s famous last sequence of edited kisses in Cinema Paradiso. But in The Star Maker it evokes a totally different emotion.

Ikiru (to live) – Movie Review

Poignant!!!

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Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru is one of the most heart rendering movies I have ever seen. It’s a wonderful movie where you see the master at the zenith of his craft. This is well illustrated by the fact that this movie is released in 1952 between Rashomon (1950) and Seven Samurai (1954). In my book these three are the greatest of the master’s works. What is even more endearing about this movie is that this is not as dark and hopeless as the master’s subsequent works near the end of his life.

The first shot of the movie is that of an X-Ray showing of a patient suffering from gastric cancer. The patient’s name is Mr.Watanabe, a government bureaucrat. He is infact the public relations section chief whose actual job is to address the complaints of the common man. But in reality what he does is just glance through piles of paper work and stamp his seal on them to show that he has handled the case. He is someone who has been busy all his life without having done anything fruitful.

When he discovers that he has gastric cancer, he begins to have a new perspective on his life so far. He realizes that he actually wants to live now that his days are numbered. He also begins to see his relationship with his son in a new light. He had spend his whole life living for his son whereas his son has become too self centered to care about his father.

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Watanabe who has never missed a day in office for the last thirty years begins to skip office for days. During one of these days he meets a novelist who takes him on a trip to all the bars, strip clubs and other places of revelry to show Watanabe how to live life to the fullest. Watanabe then meets a young female co-worker who is just fed up with the drudgery and boring work back at the office and wants his seal on her resignation. Watanabe tries to cling on to her and spends as much time as possible with her. He wants to live off her youthfulness and energy.

However she as well as everyone else in his family mistakes his feelings for the girl as an old age infatuation. But when she tells him about her work at a local toy factory and the joy of her work there Watanabe realizes that in order for him to be truly happy he will have to find joy at his workplace itself and do something useful. He takes up the issue of building a park for children over a waste yard.

From then on the story takes place after 5 months where we see how Watanabe, who is dead now, lived the last few days of his life as well as how he managed to get the park built. We get an idea of this through the accounts of his colleagues and friends who had gathered at his house to pay their last respects.

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What I liked the most about this movie is its narrative style. It’s absolutely amazing. In the beginning, the director gives us a sense of the bureaucracy’s inefficiency where a group of women seeking a park to be build over a wasteland (the same park Watanabe helps get built later on) are send to various departments with nobody willing to take the responsibility to help them. All the departments pass the job on to another which is shown by the director shows this with a sequence of fading shots.

Another memorable sequence is when Watanabe looks back at his relationship with his son. Again through a series of fading shots the director shows us how Watanabe comforted his son after his mother’s death, how Watanabe decides not to marry again, how felt while watching his son play a baseball game and how he felt when his son left to join the military.

But they all fade in comparison to the master’s brilliant narrative of how Watanabe triumphed in his ordeal to build the park in the end. Normally in a movie we would have seen the protagonist after undergoing a similar transformation, heroically and sometimes over dramatically going about achieving his goal. But Kurosawa wouldn’t be regarded as a genius today if he had done that. Instead he introduces a revolutionary narrative where he shows to us through other’s perspective of Watanabe how he manages to build the park in the end.

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Till the point of his starting off to build the park, the audience is very much intertwined with Watanabe’s feelings and his desperation for life. We feel every pain, desperation and loneliness of the man who knows that he has only a short while more to live. But after he starts off with his mission, the next thing that is shown to us is a group of people talking about him while paying their last respects to him.

We, the audience, are made to feel detached from the conversation that is going on and are forced to look upon the conversation from Watanabe’s point of view. Since we know more about Watanabe than any of the people assembled there we sometimes feel compelled to correct or contradict the men’s speculation about Watanabe. It’s almost as if the master wants us to feel like Watanabe is looking down on their conversation from the havens.

The acting by Takashi Shimura is top notch. I have seen him in Seven Samurai and his acting in this movie is completely opposite to the vibrant and energetic character that he played in Seven Samurai.

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Kurosawa is a master at making thought provoking movies. In this one he asks us the value of the rat race that we are involved in even today. We are so immersed in our daily routines that we forget to enjoy our precious gift called life. We forget to live while immersed in mundane pursuits. The master does this and at the same time is realistic about it all. This he shows when the Watanabe’s colleagues, even after vowing at his funeral to change their way of working, goes back to their old ineffective ways the very next day. That is the touch of a genius.

Reviews of Akira Kurosawa's Major works

Akira Kurosawa

Rashomon (1950)

Ikiru (1952)

Seven Samurai (1954)

Hidden Fortress (1958)

Yojimbo (1961)

High And Low (1963)

Red Beard (1965)

Kagemusha (1980)

Ran (1985)

Rhapsody In August (1991)

High and Low (Tengoku to jigoku)

A glimpse of heaven and hell

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“High and Low” is the English title given to the great Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film “Tengoku to jigoku” which when translated literally means “Heaven and Earth”. After watching the movie I felt that the Japanese title is more apt for the movie than its English one. Kurosawa showcases the conflicts between the haves and have-nots.

The plot opens with a business executive Kingo Gondo, played by the Kurosawa’s long time muse Toshiro Mifune, engaged in a takeover meeting with his other fellow board of directors of the National Shoe Company. The other directors want Gondo to join them in taking over the company from the hands of the owner referred to as “The old man”. They are not happy with the old man’s way running the business as they want to mass produce low quality cheap shoes. However Gondo is not inclined to do so and want to take the company forward in a totally different direction. He wants to produce good quality modern shoes. The other directors threaten to get him thrown out of the company.

What the directors do not know is that Gondo is on the verge of finalizing a deal that would make him the single largest share holder of the company. To do that, he has put his entire life’s earnings on the line. However just as he is about to settle the deal he gets a phone call where the caller claims to have kidnapped his son. Gondo is horrified and is willing to pay any amount to save his son. But soon he as well as the kidnapper realizes that there has been a mistake and the boy kidnapped is in fact his chauffeur’s son.

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From then on Gondo’s attitude completely changes. While earlier he was unwilling to get the police involved now the first thing that does is to inform them and get them actively involved in the case. He also doesn’t want to pay the money to save someone else’s life. Especially when he knows that he and his family would be financially ruined if he pays the ransom. But Gondo is raked by the pain and sorrow of the boy’s father. He is raked by guilt whenever he sees the boy’s father trying to plead with him to save his son. Gondo is not even able to look into the chaffeur’s eyes. But Gondo doesn’t have much time to decide as he has to make his decision the next day.

High and Low is one of the master’s experiments with narrative. The movie is clearly split into two halves. The first half is all about Gondo’s moral dilemma and his struggle to cling on to both his future as well as his humanity. He knows that he will have to let go of one of them. The second half however deals completely with the police investigation into the case to bring the mastermind to justice. If the first half is a crime thriller which asks pertinent moral questions off the individual, the second half is a detective movie which asks the same questions about the society. Both these halves or acts are interlinked by a train sequence which serves as a bridge between the two worlds.

Without a doubt however the best part of the movie is the first part. Kurosawa masterfully creates the required tension and anxiety in us about the boy’s fate. This keeps us engaged with the whole drama that unfolds from the moment the boy is kidnapped. We feel the chauffeur’s pain. We admire the detective’s professionalism. Above we identify with Gondo’s struggle with himself and his values.

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The second half though is not as engaging. You sometimes feel that the movie loses its pace at critical points. The investigation is very realistic giving us an insight into a proper police investigation rather than some fancy detective work. Some might say that it is a bit too realistic. It is shredded of the dramatics and the intelligence that is required to keep an investigation engaging in a movie. Kurosawa attempts to make it as matter of fact as possible.

High and Low shows us another facet of Toshiro Mifune’s acting. He shows his versatility in this movie. Gone are the eccentric and loud mannerisms of his characters of Seven Samurai and Rashomon. Neither is the cool heroism of Yojimbo and The Hidden Fortress on display. Mifune’s Gondo is an exhibition in restrain. He looks like a volcano of emotions ready to explode but barely managing to hold back. His mannerisms clearly indicate what he is going through and leaves no one in doubt about his struggles with himself. He conveys his guilt by never looking at the chauffeur all the while saying that he will not pay the money. There are moments when he can’t even stand the presence of the man close to him.

Kurosawa attempts to show a mirror to the society through High and Low. The movie is indeed set in heaven and Hell. The first half takes place entirely in the air conditioned luxurious villa of Gondo which is set on top of a hill. The second half takes place in the outdoors where people are shown in great discomfort due to the heat, constantly wiping their faces and neck off sweat. He takes us through the slums, whorehouses and drug alleys of Tokyo. The movie asks poignant questions with no easy answers on offer.

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The movie is a showcase in contrast between the haves and have-nots. He even briefly touches upon the evils of corporatization. But what really makes you think is the climax of the movie when Gondo confronts the mastermind of the crime. The mastermind’s motive was as much a rebellion towards the inequalities of the society as it is a personal vendetta against Gondo, symbolized by his hatred towards Gondo’s house on top of the hill. He is not afraid of going to hell as he says his whole life was hell. But if he were to go to heaven, then he would really tremble. The movie is indeed about life in heaven or hell here on earth itself.

Reviews of Akira Kurosawa's Major works

Akira Kurosawa

Rashomon (1950)

Ikiru (1952)

Seven Samurai (1954)

Hidden Fortress (1958)

Yojimbo (1961)

High And Low (1963)

Red Beard (1965)

Kagemusha (1980)

Ran (1985)

Rhapsody In August (1991)