10 GREAT FOREIGN FILMS YOU NEED TO SEE (REPOST)

One of the best days of any cinema-goer's life is the day that they discover the entire world waiting for them in foreign cinema. Whether it is an old film a parent loves, or something you have to see at school that you end up falling in love with, everyone has their first experience of world cinema. World cinema is an endless source of films that can shock, surprise, pacify and challenge you. Here are just ten that I love, in no particular order.

OLDBOY (2003)

This South Korean revenge thriller from director Park Chan Wook really is as good as it gets. Not only is it twisted and unbelievably violent in places, but its also sharp, funny, intelligent and brutally uncompromising. It is stacked full of clever foreshadowing and clues which don't register when you see it for the first time, but upon rewatching it just opens up like a flower and turns into a whole new movie all over again. One of cinema's all time classic twist endings rightfully takes a lot of the attention in conversations about this film, but just as important are some of the best choreographed fight scenes of the century, including one now iconic single tracking shot down a hallway as protagonist Oh Dae-su takes out a whole mob with nothing but a hammer. Like pretty much every film on this list, it is immediately apparent that you are watching a film that is not bound by the cultural and cinematic restraints that define much of western cinema. Oldboy is classic revenge cinema, and is a film that will make you incredibly uncomfortable but keep you completely compelled right up to its bloody end.

STALKER (1979)

If you are not familiar with Andrei Tarkovsky, perhaps either Ivan's Childhood or Solaris would be better entry points into the heights of Soviet cinema, but if you're up for a deep dive into dreamy, philosophical science fiction with no restraint on atmosphere you will fall in love with Stalker. The fact that the film even exists is in itself a minor miracle, given that not only the film had to be completely reshot when a fault in the film development process ruined the original negatives, but also that the toxic conditions of the filming locations likely caused the cancer of Tarkovsky, his wife, and others who worked on the film. Despite these setbacks and Tarkovsky reportedly wanting to abandon the project at multiple stages of production, Stalker is his hypnotic, eerie masterpiece that aims to absorb its audience in its pace rather than pacify it. Allow yourself to be absorbed by it, and you will be irreversibly changed by it, regularly finding yourself thinking about its themes, its shots, its philosophy.

CITY OF GOD (2002)

Set in slums of Rio, City of God follows the coming of age of an aspiring photographer as he grows up amongst gang violence, crime and corruption. Nominated for four Academy Awards at the 2004 Oscars, it has rightly been recognised as one of the most important films in world cinema this century. Sharp and snappy editing plays a huge role in the storytelling and aesthetic of the film, and Leonardo Firmino's performance as the formidable and unpredictable Li'l Ze is exhilarating to watch. Exciting, inspiring, and life-affirming, City of God is a great option for someone who might not be quite sold on the whole subtitles thing yet.

EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960)

Like all great horror films, Eyes Without A Face has a reputation that preceded it well before I finally ended up seeing it. And like all great chillers, it is laced with a pure strain of sadness and nostalgia that constantly competes with the scares for your attention. Directed by Georges Franju out of France in 1960, the story centres around a doctor trying to provide his daughter with a new face after a horrific car accident has left her horribly disfigured. Even now it is disarmingly gory in parts, an element of the film that has come to define it somewhat with a modern audience. But I suggest that even with that level of medical gore you do not go in expecting anything, especially anything that modern horror cinema might have suggested to you that this film might be like. Eyes Without A Face is such an important film for every horror fan to see, not least because of the influence its now iconic mask has proven to have had on horror cinema.

ONIBABA (1964)

Onibaba is the last film that really unsettled me in the way you remember being unsettled as a young kid seeing something you were too young to have seen. Shot in stunning black and white and set amongst 14th century Japanese civil war, this story of a woman and her recently deceased husband's mother's routine of killing samurai and selling their weapons and armour is one that really got to me. While one of them begins an affair with a man next door, the other encounters a strange samurai wearing a bizarre mask. What follows is, like I said, one of the most mind-alteringly disturbing films I have seen. It's location amongst the tall susuki grass makes for one of the most claustrophobic but also mystical horror settings put to film. It just starts in a place of dread and uncertainty, and continues to send you down a path of which you can't see very far ahead right up until its bone-chilling ending. If you're interested in Japanese horror cinema, there are worse places to start than here.

DOGTOOTH (2009)

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has found international fame thanks to films like The Favourite, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but Dogtooth for me is the purest distillation of the signature dry humour and razor-sharp wit that he has been recognised to be such a proponent for. The film is an allegorical tale of three teenagers living in an isolated home with their parents, who have taught them as they have grown up that they can only leave the house once their dogtooth falls out. To them, flying airplanes are like the toy ones they play with, cats are vicious killers, and a "phone" is the salt shaker they pass around at dinner time. The parents employ Christina, a female security guard he knows from work, to come over and relieve the son of his male urges, but it all feels very robotic. Christina quickly becomes tired of such banal and meaningless routine, and begins to upset the established order of this isolated family, bringing in culture from the outside world in the form of films, teaching the children about the real world, and looking for sexual gratification elsewhere in the family, causing experimentation and disrupted sexual equilibrium (the film received attention for containing scenes of real sexual activity). Intensely funny and dry in its dealings with taboo subject matter like incest, it is bizarre, disturbing, hilarious, strangely sexless in a film full of it, and absurdly acerbic.

THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE (2001)

Director Guillermo del Toro is most famous for his 2006 classic Pan's Labyrinth, and now perhaps also his Best Picture winning film The Shape of Water, but The Devil's Backbone is just as important an entry in his (mostly) consistently outstanding back catalogue. A brother film to Pan's Labyrinth, it follows similar themes of war, escapism, trauma, fascism and loss of innocence through the lens of a classic gothic chiller. The film is creepy and unsettling but also profoundly melancholic in a wistful way that has become del Toro's bread and butter over the years. The concept of the ghost is such a well-trodden trope of horror cinema, but what The Devil's Backbone proves is that past trauma, repressed violence, and the irreversible loss of death is at the heart of every great ghost story.

THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957)

Every cinephile has to embark on their Ingmar Bergman odyssey at some point, and there is no better film to start with than The Seventh Seal. Undeniably a classic, it portrays the late Max von Sydow as a knight during the Black Plague as he plays a game of chess with Death, conversing about life, death and the existence of God. There are images that are so deeply entrenched in the common memory of cinema that even if you haven't seen the film, chances are you've seen images from it before. Once you've seen The Seventh Seal, Cries and Whispers and Persona are my next two Bergman picks. They are essentials for a reason, and The Seventh Seal just has too much cultural significance to not be on your list of films to see.

AKIRA (1988)

Akira is maybe the most iconic anime feature film to crack western popular cinema. Startlingly violent in places, impossibly cool, and incredibly sharp in its commentary, Akira is as good as everyone says it is. The film takes place in 2019, 30 years after Tokyo is levelled by a nuclear World War III, in what is now known as Neo-Tokyo, where a gang of bike-riding teenagers get mixed up in a telekinetic conspiracy that changes their group and possibly the world, as the threat of Akira, the force that caused the destruction at the end of WWIII, emerges once again in ways they could never have expected. The animation is nothing short of amazing, and even the English dub version of the film is actually really well performed and mixed. Well worth seeing for anyone.

AUDITION (1999)

Don't read anything about this film before you see it! It is best experienced knowing nothing about it at all. My first viewing of Audition is one of the most memorable experiences of seeing a film I've had. I'm not even going to say any more about it - just go see it.

I'd love to know your thoughts about the list, and if you see any of these for the first time based on these recommendations, I'd love to know what you think about them! Get in touch down in the comments section. Hopefully you find some recommendations in this list that you can enjoy this holiday season!
Originally posted Dec 2020