The MoFo Top 100 Foreign Language Film Countdown

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Turns out Thief is a big fan of bed-****ting!
Yeah, but what does that have to do with this countdown or this forum
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Yeah, but what does that have to do with this countdown or this forum
No kink-shaming here!



Ugh, not at home and don’t remember my Tubi login. That’s where I watched it though, and it’s still there. Maybe you can tell me whether it’s dubbed or not.
Yeah, the Tubi version is dubbed.
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Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Ugh, not at home and don’t remember my Tubi login. That’s where I watched it though, and it’s still there. Maybe you can tell me whether it’s dubbed or not.
It's the dubbed version which is the only version.
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Usually dubbed bothers me, surprised I forgot.
Yeah, dubbing can be difficult to adjust to for sure. With Suspiria though, I think the artificiality of it benefits the film.



Another pair of great films. This list quality so far. Could turn out to be the third best mofo countdown list ever, after 90s and documentaries.
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I've seen and really enjoyed The Conformist, but again, no room on the list. I've never seen Suspiria - I'm just not into horror, but sounds like it's still worth a look



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Another pair of great films. This list quality so far. Could turn out to be the third best mofo countdown list ever, after 90s and documentaries.
90s is my favorite because Sexy Celebrity hated it so much.



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
The Conformist is my favorite Bertolucci. The film looks incredible and the visuals greatly complement the story/meaning. It's easy to understand the film given the title and the quote "After all, what have I done? My duty.". It's basically vivisection of conformist attitudes and Italians dealing with their Fascist past... The film might have been influential on European cinema, but it's hard to tell. Just when you refuse to believe Istvan Szabo was not inspired by The Conformist while making Mefisto, you find out Mefisto is just an adaptation of a 1934 book. Guess what. The Conformist is also an adaptation of a book. Books sure make cinephiles' lives harder. I wonder if Bertolucci was, in turn, inspired by Visconti’s The Damned...



Suspiria is my favorite Argento and I like it more and more every time I see it. I watched it three times so far and certainly wouldn't mind giving it another watch, provided a 4K restoration was released a couple of years ago, and I haven't seen it since 2016. Suspiria is a very entry-level film for people who still think films need a plot or story. Let's be honest, it was probably the gateway into the more plot-free, oneiric films to most of us. If you're looking for logic, solve an integral equation or something. Nightmares have no logic.

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The Conformist is a very good film- here are my brief thoughts


The Conformist

The Conformist (Bertolucci, 1970)-



The Conformist is a film that has stuck with me since my initial viewing a few days ago, perhaps it deserves half a star higher. The slow style draws similarity to Melville's assassin film Le Samourai. Trintignant puts up a solid performance as the assassin (Marcello), but my issue with the character was he felt to smooth to be a universal conformist. Marcello feels like a charming individual, just not another man in the crowd. The film does reveal what it means with labeling Marcello as a conformist with the climax, which follows his fascist conformity. The second theme, sex, is also addressed in the end which I feel is the most important scene in the whole film. The last scene is chilling and revealing, crucial to the film.
Suspiria was not my cup of tea
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I initially had Army of Shadows on my list, but I think it got bumped at the last minute. Probably because it is a movie I've only seen once, and I only have vague notion of what happens in it, and it seemed silly to include a film that I can't even talk about why I love. It just left a deep impression, much like all of Melville's films, even the one's I don't particularly like (like Red Circle)


I think the movie I bumped it for, is the movie that I chose instead of including the Conformist. I didn't really feel like double dipping on Nazi's. Seemed tacky. So, even though The Conformist didn't make the cut either, I have a special place in my heart for it. It was one of the first films I ever saw which made me realize how not only the subject of a film could be deadly serious, but also its form. Of course, I initially hated it because of that, thought the film class I was taking was going to be a big waste if they actually expected me to think about the movies we were watching, but as the years went on, my mind kept returning to this movie I thought was a complete slog. Now I'm not quite as dumb anymore though, I have myself a copy, and sometimes put it on simply as a film I like to keep me company.



I didn't know dubbed movies counted, so I overlooked Suspiria. This is probably a good thing though, because then my whole list would have been horrid Italian trash. Fulci would have been spitting guts up all over this fancy pants list of yours.
As for Suspiria, what more needs to be said. It's the kind of cinematic perfection that led me to watch it two times in a row the first time I saw it, then immediately the next morning when I woke up. It was like I couldn't believe it could even be real, and that I would catch it not existing if I just kept playing the DVD over and over. It's a watershed movie for me, as a result. Nothing would be the same after I saw it. I recalibrated my entire critical outlook. It's that good. And everyone who disagrees just makes me profoundly sad.


Sonatine is Kitano, and so I know I love Sonatine. The problem is, I can never really tell any of his movies apart, and have just become this amorphous blob of what a man completely committed to his weirdo instincts can create if he doesn't worry if he ends up alienating whose chunks of his audience. I'm pretty sure this isn't the one that beings in a baseball outhouse. And it's thankfully not the one with all the CGI blood. I should probably rewatch it, because I own the majority of them.


I've never seen Raise the Red Lantern. It's one of those movies that has always been on my radar, but the title sounds boring, so I haven't pulled the trigger. Titles are important to me. I'm pretty sure half of my rating gets tied up in such first impressions.


I've seen a bunch of Roberto Rosselini pictures, and have always liked them well enough, but none has ever really made a huge impression beyond Voyage to Italy. I'm certain I've seen Germany Year Zero, but I may as well not have, considering how little I retained.


I like The Vanishing a lot, but not enough to have included it on this list. Much has already been mentioned about the horror of how unassuming the villain is. And that is kind of the key to everything in this film. I've never known what to say beyond that point. But as a tense, unnerving watch, its as visceral as it gets, and that counts for something.



suspiria is the first film from my list, i had it #20.

last year at marienbad is great. didn't make my list but would've made my top 50.

i watched the exterminating angel for one of the personal rec hall of fames and i really liked it. my favorite bunuel of the four i've seen.

we watched raise the red lantern in history class in high school and i appreciated it for the cinematography but it was hard to give it its proper due in a room full of snickering teenagers. would need to watch it again to properly judge it.

i like nights of cabiria, rome, open city, sonatine, and the conformist, roughly in that order, but haven't seen any of them in years and feel like i could potentially love any of them upon rewatch.

haven't seen the rest but would like to see them all, particularly the skin i live in and army of shadows. i had another melville on my list.
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At the time I saw it I thought Sonantine was one of the worst films I'd ever seen. Could see myself being kinder to it now but I'm not going out of my way to find out. Kitano has X-Pac heat with me if he's not being dubbed over for MXC episodes tbh.

The Conformist is like a textbook perfect film, which is why it'll never be a personal favourite but I still dig it a lot.

Suspira absolutely rips and we all know this.





Bertolucci's Il Conformista was on my list at number nineteen (seven points). I had seen it in my late teens or so when I was first devouring world cinema and was impressed by those visuals and the odd tone, but I didn't fall in love with it. A few years later I read Alberto Moravia's novel as part of an advanced literature class (hooray for English majors!) and then revisited Bertolucci's adaptation. With a better understanding of the historical context as well as the fuller complexity of the book I began to appreciate it more and more. The second half of the film initially reminded me of the Eternal City section of both Heller's Catch-22 as well as Mike Nichols' big screen adaptation (coincidentally released the same year as Bertolucci's opus), both of which I had loved before I read/saw The Conformist. The Italian pieces do not have the same iconic and brilliant dark humor of Catch-22 - little does - but as satirical, surreal polemics they do have their intersections.

I have seen The Conformist several times on the big screen including not too long ago here at the AFI theatre in Silver Spring, MD with legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro on hand for a Q&A afterwards. Its visuals are stunning even if you don't particularly like or get the film, influencing the likes of Polanski's Chinatown and The Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing. I couldn't make a Top 25 foreign language films list and not include it.

HOLDEN’S BALLOT
6. Army of Shadows (#90)
19. The Conformist (#88)
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Two more films that missed the list. Haven't seen The Conformist, although it might have been on my Netflix queue when it was on there?

Suspiria, thought it was fairly good. The visuals are the best selling point with a couple of nice kills and evoking a dreamlike state. The third act is a bit messy and I found the score intrusive and annoying (but I'm kind of the minority in the horror group on this). But you definitely can identify with the lead and her plight being a stranger in a strange land. As a result, you get drawn into the mystery about the ballet school.