Best foreign film of all-time

Kielowski's Dekalog definitely belongs here, finished watching last night, amazing.

Most of my favorite films are foreign.

But The Seventh Seal and Rashomon are the best films ever made, period.

La Vite E Bella... oooh, or Cinema Paradiso... or Amelie... hrmmmm one of those...

Battle Royale has been mentioned a few times and for good reason, it is a wicked movie.
but nobody has mentioned Battle Royale 2. Written and directed by kenta fukasaku, son of kinji fukasaku who passed away during the films production and based on the original novel by koushun takami. It is an excellent film and continues the story very well. I recommend both of these movies to anyone who hasn't seen them.

I was not so impressed with Battle Royale 2 myself. It had some good variations of the original premise but for me it was a little convoluted. I still liked it. It just doesn't measure up when compared to the first one.

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Most of the reviews i've read of BR2 were pretty damning, heaping scorn on the handling of the US-criticisms it apparently employed/implied, and generally concluding that the director's son wasn't up to the job of taking over the film. Can you defend it from those accusations, or recommend other aspects of it?

[EDIT: I should point out that many of the critics were left-leaning types, and not all State-siders by any means, who would have no problems with the concept of criticising the Bush-ites etc . They're objections seemed to be more that the job was badly/simplistically done]

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In comparison to the first movie it is definately lacking some creativity when it came to the deaths. Rather than everyone getting a different weapon(tazer, pot lid, crossbow) they all received guns. The movie did however put some interesting twists on how the game was played. Instead of pitching the students against each other, they united them against those who resisted against the br program. This gave br2 more of a war movie feeling to it which i didn't mind(I love war movies).

And yes, maybe the movie would have been better if kinji fukasaku had lived to finish it but under the circumstances his son did a pretty good job as a first time solo director.and I'm pretty sure he knew what he wanted to achieve with the movie considering he wrote the screenplay.unlike many films I've seen, the sequel had an interesting and original plotline while staying true to the first. i enjoyed watching it and so did many of my friends.worth watching if you haven't seen it, it's the only real way to find out whether it will appeal to you.

Ay, true . So many films, and such a big world tho. Gotta pick and choose

The best so far would be Amores Perros. I just like the overall structure of the movie.

There is a little known film from Japan called "SWOLLOWTAIL BUTTERFLY" it details the rags to riches story of a group of Chinese imigrants in "YENtown" the chinatown for poor chinese on the outskirts of Tokyo Japan during the 1980's. The scenery and visual direction alone are wirth sitting through the movie, it is cool!

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Yojimbo was great, as for a newer foreign film Amelie was also very goos

Amelie from montmartre is my favourite foreign film.

I forgot and had to come back to write down tsotsi

Amelie

I feel that it's easily The Mirror, by Tarkovsky. But I'll list a top ten:

1. The Mirror - Tarkovsky
2. 8 1/2 - Fellini
3. Pickpocket - Bresson
4. Persona - Bergman
5. Contempt - Godard
6. The Bicycle Thief - De Sica
7. Hiroshima mon Amour - Resnais
8. Seppuku - Kobayashi
9. Stroszek - Herzog
10. Forbidden Games - Clement

I can't narrow it to less than 3. So I'd have to say Rashomon, La Dolce Vita , Le Samouraï. I've only recently seen Vita and Le Samouraï(in the last year and a half or so) but they are great. They're just sooooo cool. I feel like a bit of a loser using cool to discribe a film, but that's the only word that seems to fit. IMO they rank right up there with Pulp Fiction on the cool scale.

Also I watched Yiyi on based on the review of the NY Times, and it was quite good. It doen't rank up there with the best foreign films of all times, but check it out, it's good.

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So many amazing Foreign films, here are some of my favorites:

The 400 Blows
Ran
M
Rashomon
Band of Outsiders
Wages of Fear
Ikiru
Russian Ark
Seventh Seal
The Third Man
Jules and Jim
The Cranes are Flying
Samurai trilogy
Kagemusha
Yi Yi
Yojimbo
Harakiri
Hiroshima mon Amour
City of God
Forrbidden Games
Shoot the Piano Player
Sword of doom
and many MANY more.

i loathe this thread....

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Not enough Croatian movies for ya?

Luckily, no.

New York based films are just so alienatingly foreign.

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EDIT
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I can't really recommend this properly, as i haven't seen all of it, but...

Meghe Dhaka Tara is a very odd 'new wave' 60s Bollywood romance/tragedy.

It has a lot of fairly showy 'western'-influenced/experimental shots and transitions, but the core story seemed pretty down-dirty-n-tragic. The result is peculiar.

Foreign how? American films are foreign to other nations, but I'm assuming you mean non-American. What about British films? Mrs. Henderson Presents was a wonderful movie that was from England, but it wasn't really foreign in the same sense. My favorite foreign language movies are:

Amelie
Killer
Battle Royale
VS
A Very Long Engagement

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