Film recommendations

Some foreign cinema art-house picks;

Of Gods and Men

Le Quatrro Volte

Pans Labrynth

Recently I think The Assasination of Jessie James, Gran Torino and Moonrise Kingdom come to mind of  US releases. There Will Be Blood is astonishIng.

Bruce

In the past 10 years, good movies have included:

A Separation (Iran)

The Artist (Belgium/France)

The Lizard (bizarre but very good comedy from Iran)

Kandahar (Iran)

Still Life (China)

The Motorcycle Diaries (Brazil)

Of Gods and Men (France)

Spirited Away (Japan)

Kevin,

Great movies and my  favourite has to be Kandahar mainly for it's photography. Also, since the days of Manga, (The crying Man), I have always been a great fan of Japanese animated movies and Spirited Away is a great example of it. Correct meif I'm wrong but I think TMD is an argentinian production not brazilian. Central Station and, of course, City of God, are great brazilian movies. Great stuff!

KR

Tony

Warwick, much of Hollywood's output these days is drivel, but in its heyday, Hollywood produced much masterful work - Howard Hawks, Welles and Hitchcock especially. The work of Robert Siodmak, Preston Sturges, Terrence Malick and Billy Wilder are also worthy of very serious consideration.

Along with France, America has produced more than its fair share of cinematic masterpieces.

If you're really into serious arthouse cinema, then you have to consider the two greatest masters of all - Jean Renoir of France and Carl Theodor Dreyer from Denmark. They were very different men and made very different kinds of movies, but for me they are cinema's greatest poets.

Renoir made two unsurpassed masterpieces, "La Regle du Jeu" and "La Grande Illusion", which are absolutely essential viewing IMO; but virtually every single one of the 50-odd films he made are worth viewing. The stately "The River" is, along with "The Red Shoes", "Days of Heaven" and "Shane", perhaps the most visually ravishing movie ever made. Others I can thoroughly recommend are "La Marseilles", "Le Crime de M. Lange", "French Can can", the charming, elegiac "Partie de Campagne", "Boudou Sauvee des Eaux", "The Golden Coach" and "La Bete Humaine". In Renoir's films, nobody and everybody is guilty, nobody is judged, but everyone is profundly human; Renoir is the most humane of directors.

Dreyer is a far more austere, exacting, film-maker - he used spare, small sets, with little action (his films, are about the internal lives of men and women) and his films are dazzling to look at - as Mark Cousins said, "no director used whiteness as much, or as well, as Dreyer."

I think the most evisceratingly raw and moving film I've ever seen is Dreyer's "Passion of Joan of Arc", a silent masterpiece which contains what many critics and film buffs regard as the single greatest performance - by Maria Falconetti in the title role - ever committed to celluloid. She acts mostly with her face, often just her eyes, and it is extraordinary.

Between 1930 and his death in 1968, Dreyer only made four films - the eerie, dreamlike "Vampyr", the powerful "Vredens dag", the staggering "Ordet" and the stately (so slow, nothing seems to happen) "Gertrud". All are essential viewing.

When you watch the movies of these two men, you begin to see the awesome power of movies - you will be a changed person after viewing.

I think you're right - but Salles is definitely Brazilian. I agree, "Central Station" is a superlative film.

I should also mention the contribution we Brits have made to cinema. It's highly underrated, and almost makes up for the crimes of Guy Ritchie.

There's Hitch of course, and Carol Reed and David Lean, and Ealing, but the best British films have come from the team of director/writer Michael Powell and producer/writer Emeric Pressberger. They made four Technicolor films in the 1940s - "The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp", "A Matter of Life And Death", "The Red Shoes" and "Black Narcissus". These beautiful, saturated, dreamlike (and sometimes melodramatic) films are for me the high point of Brit cinema. The first three in particular are astonishing in their visual and (for the time) narrative daring and deserve their place up there with the work of Dreyer, Renoir and Welles.

Also worthy of serious consideration is their 1943 B&W masterpiece "A Canterbury Tale", as well as Powell's shocking and years-ahead-of-its-time "Peeping Tom" and his contributions to Korda's extraordinary 1940 fantasy "The Thief of Baghdad".

You should also consider the work of Ozu (particularly "Tokyo Story"), Mizoguchi, Peckinpah, Rene Clair, Bergman ("Seventh Seal", "Wild Strawberries" and "Smiles on a Summer Night"), Jean Cocteau, JP Melville, Jules Dassin, Kurosawa, FW Murnau, Esenstein ("Battleship Potemkin", "Alexander Nevsky" and "Ivan the Terrible"), Sayjit Ray ("The Apu Trilogy"), DW Griffifth, Dziga Vertov, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Bela Tarr, Benjamin Christensen ("Haxan", 1921, was a big influence on Dreyer), Louis Feuillade, Francis Ford Coppola, Spielberg's brilliant low-budget thriller "Duel", Fritz Lang, the tragically short-lived Jean Vigo, and GW Pabst.

Just for starters

To pinch the quote from Kevin-W, the most 'evisceratingly raw and moving film that I have ever seen' would be Das Boot.

Settle down for the long Directors Cut version and emerge blinking into the sunlight as a physical and emotional wreck.

Bruce

Cinema Paridiso, the directors cut.

Three colours trilogy. If you only watch one Blue is the best. If you watch red you must watch blue and white first.

Life Is beautiful.

Solaris, the original Andrie Tarkovsky version

For something more modern "I'm a cyborg, but that's OK" is worth a look.

Cinema Paradiso is one of my favourite film! So moving.

Others to try:

Monsieur Hire

The Hairdresser's Husband

Tell No One

Melena

The Orphanage (Del Toro Produced)

The Devil's Backbone (Del Toro Directing)

Regards

Neil

Ahhhh - at LAST.Someone who really knows what he is talking about - AND understands World Cinema

Sister xx

Thanks Sis

I was lucky in that I had an aunt who was a fanatical film buff. Also my dad's best mate's wife was hugely knowledgeable on the golden age of Hollywood and Hitchcock so I got into the movie habit very young. In fact I was fanatical about movies long before I got obsessed with music.

Tunbridge Wells, where I grew up, had a very good film society, which often screened silent classics and REAL Hollywood gold from the 30s and 40s.

The real turning point for me was seeing "Citizen Kane" and "A Matter of Life & Death" aged 15 and realising the power of movies; and also the Renoir season BBC2 ran back in (I think) 1979, which made me fall in love with the great man's work.

When I was studying he history of art at Uni, I studied French cinema 1925 to 1939 and I was lucky to have had a very good tutor - James Leahy, a pupil of Nicholas Ray, no less - who introduced me to the joys of Vigo and Dreyer. I also lived in Paris for a while in my youth and was able to watch an awful lot of great cinema there.

x

A very good grounding indeed....I came to a lot of those wonderful films you admire so much when I was just a gal in my early 20s at University running the Film Society. Also gave me the opportunity to bring in all the most controversial films of the time including all the Divine/ John Waters masterpieces, Pasolini's Salo/120 days of Sodom and all the Rainer Werner Fassbinder movies.

Those were the days

Sister xx 

Two smaller films of theirs - "I Know Where I'm Going" and "Small Back Room" are also worth a look. "Gone to Earth" probably isn't - but I did anyway.

"Peeping Tom", for me, isn't quite anything but worth seeing for perspective on Powell's work. His "Age of Consent" doesn't amount to much - apart from quite a deal of a young Helen Mirren.

Blimey. I didn't get to see Salo until about 2007! (Although I'm not sure it was worth the wait )

Both of those are very fine movies Adam, although like you I'm not overly keen on "Age of Consent". I do however like another late work, "They're a Weird Mob" very much. His first major film, "Edge of the World" is another gem made without Pressberger.

Of the other Archers films, I do have a soft spot for "Ill Met by Moonlight", a spiffing (and true) WW2 story, and the ravishing "Tales of Hoffmann", which is to opera what "The Red Shoes" is to ballet.

Agree with reservations about the Tales of Hoffman(which certainly has its moments) but I can't help feeling the Red Shoes was the last great hurrah for Powell and Pressburger - from then on it was all downhill, ending with the appallingly dull "Battle of the River Plate.

Actually I think"The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" is their crowning achievement.

Kevin  -  Salo was certainly strong meat and positively repulsive at times(its intention)...But at least it made the following night double bill "Pink Falmingos/Taxi Zum Glo seem like the Sound of Music.

Sister xx 

Absolutely agree.  The most amazing thing was this was the only thing Falconetti ever did. I first saw this movie in Chicago at the Medina Temple (now a Bloomingdales furniture store) with a choir singing a score someone had written for this movie

anywhoo.. From the last 10 years....

A Seperation.   Yes.  Astonishing

The Artist.  I just adored this movie

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.   My fav from last 10 years

The Headless Woman.   From Argentina I think

The Saddest Movie in the World, My Winnepeg and Brand Upon the Brain. All by guy Maddin

Metropolitan and Barcelona by Whit Stillman. 

Anything by Aki Kaurismaki

The Pusher Trilogy from Denmark

A Taste of Cherry

Eastern Promises.   The shower scene with Viggo Mortensen is the greatest fight scene since the battle of Shrewsbury in Chimes at Midnight

Spikes best:   Do the right thing

Sex Lies and videotape

Oh.  And Quentin Tarantino just annoys me but Inglorious Bastards or however he spelled it was seriously good

Red shoes was indeed a great film, but shouldn't a lot of the credit go to Jack Cardiff.

To a degree (as it should go to art director Arthur Lawson, the choreographers Helpmann and Massine, Brian Easdale for his music and the lead players Moira Shearer, Marius Goring and the magnificent Anton Walbrook). Cardiff is a fantastic cinematographer.

But really it is Pressberger (and especially) Powell's film. Nobody else could have made it. All of the Archers' films are very different, but are united by a unique vision, which is hard to pin down but which is there nevertheless.

It is what makes them special.

Many thanks to all you silver screen scholars for your recommendations.

I will look these all up on the Lovefilm website at the weekend. Sadly not much work by Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorcese on this film streaming website. Only £5 month so can't complain too much. I still haven't got used to having cable tv so will have to check out Sky Arts (been some excellent music programmes on this channel) and Film 4.

Cinema Paradiso, Kandahar, and the Motorcycle Diaries are all great films.