Help me with Foreign (Non-English) Movie Recommendations

@cricket, @Holden Pike, and @Citizen Rules,
I watched Good Bye Lenin! (2003) - I almost turned this movie off after about 20 minutes because it felt like I was watching a history lesson, but I decided to continue, and I'm glad that I did. It took a while for me to get into the movie, but once it got into the part where the family was trying to protect the mother by hiding the political changes, it got interesting.

While it was obvious how much Alex loved his mother, I also wondered how much of what he was doing was because he felt guilty about causing her heart attack. I would have liked to see more interaction between some of the other family members and the mother, but it didn't really hurt the movie either.

But there were a few minor things bothered me. For example, when Alex found his mother's hidden money. They got rid of the old furniture while the mother was still in the hospital, and it took them a while to ask her about the money, and her a while to remember where she hid it, so why was the old furniture still sitting outside in a junk pile? Shouldn't it have been removed months ago? And why did he throw the "worthless" money off the roof? He only went to one bank to try to exchange it. Maybe there was somewhere else that it could have been exchanged? He didn't even try to find another place to exchange it. And the thing that bothered me the most was when Alex woke up and his mother's bed was empty, and he ran outside to find her, he left the baby all alone in the house. I know that he wasn't thinking about the baby in that moment, and he needed to find his mother ASAP, but it still bothered me.

But while this movie was a bit far-fetched, it was still an enjoyable movie to watch.

Thanks for the recommendation.

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@Thursday Next,

I watched Departures (2008). When this movie started, and I saw them basically cleaning a dead body, I thought this was going to be a very morbid movie, and I couldn't really understand why it was recommended to me, but I stuck with it anyway, and I'm glad that I did. It turned out to be a very touching movie. It showed death in a way that most people don't really see it, and gave it more meaning, including theories about how the dead move on to the afterlife.

I was surprised that Daigo let his wife leave without at least trying to explain to her why his job was so important to him, but maybe he was right because she probably wouldn't have listened to him at that time anyway. She had only seen the video that he made, and that didn't have the emotion of a real ceremony. But when she came back, and she was able to actually see the ceremony, that's when the movie completely turned around for me, and I was able to feel the emotion that he could feel during the ceremony.



Thanks for the recommendation.

@Holden Pike,
I watched Romantics Anonymous (2010), and I loved this movie! This was an adorably quirky romance between two people with debilitating fears of romance. The way these two people were so afraid of each other, but they somehow managed to fall in love anyway was absolutely adorable. I could almost feel their racing heartbeats, their sweaty palms, and all of their anxieties. And the ending was perfect.

However on a personal note, as a chocoholic who has been trying to diet recently, this was very hard to watch them making and eating all of that chocolate. I'm just glad that I was riding the exercise bike while watching this because it took all of my willpower to not jump off the bike, and go eat a chocolate bar.

Thank you for the wonderful recommendation.

@Hey Fredrick,

I watched Timecrimes (2007). I probably wouldn't have watched this without your recommendation because the movie poster made it look like a horror movie, but it turned out to be a great movie, with lots of twists and turns. I loved the way each time loop built on the previous loop. I liked how each loop explained what was going on in the previous loop, and at the same time, caused the things that happened in the previous loop.



I highly recommend this movie for anyone who likes time travel movies.

Thanks for the great recommendation.

@Holden Pike,
I watched Tell No One (2006). This is an excellent murder mystery with twists and turns around every corner, but beneath the murder mystery, is the love story between Alex and Margot.

I don't want to say too much because I don't want to give away any spoilers, but there are so many secrets and lies going on in this movie that it's hard to keep track of them all, but somehow they manage to all make sense in the end. This movie turns out to be one of the best mystery movies ever.

On a separate note, François Cluzet, who stars as Alex, looks exactly like Dustin Hoffman.

Thank you for the great recommendation.

@Diehl40,
I watched Winter Light (1963), but sadly, it just wasn't my type of movie. I rarely like religious movies, and this movie was just too slow and a bit too boring for my taste. It didn't get interesting until about an hour into the movie, (around the time that the guy shot himself).

I don't know if maybe I missed the point of the movie, but the pastor seemed like a pretty bad pastor. He lost his faith, and he wasn't able to help anyone. He wasn't a nice person either.

Unfortunately I didn't like this movie as much as I had hoped to, but thanks for the recommendation.

Yip Man (2008)- Chinese .... I don't recommend the sequels though..... this just in case you were having fun watching Jackie Chan movies for amusement
A Quiet Life (2010) - Italian
The Chambermaid (2018) - Mexican
Another Round (2020) -
Deerskin (2019) - French
Perfect Strangers (2016) / Perfetti sconosciuti - Italian ( this one I liked a lot)...

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Seun (Darrell Roodt, 2014) (Afrikaans) - A young man just returning home from school only has a few weeks before he must enlist in the Army during the Angolan Border War. When during a mission, he sacrifices himself to save another soldier, he is paralyzed from the neck down, forcing a conflict between his parents. Very emotional and powerful IMO.

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The pastor did not really lose his faith. (he could not lose what he really never had) He only went into the ministry because his family wanted him to. He had not really grasped the gospel until the the handicapped caretaker explained it to him. At the end he is reoriented, so that he can now live and preach the gospel for real.

The only one of these movies that I've heard of is Another Round (2020), and it's already on my watchlist, but I will also check out the other movies you recommended.

Thanks for the recommendations.

(FYI, I think the only Jackie Chan movie that I've seen is The Cannonball Run, but I don't think that's really considered a "Jackie Chan movie". )

I haven't heard of this movie, and I'm very hit or miss with war movies, but this sounds like it might be more about the soldier than the war, so I added it to my watchlist,

Thanks for the recommendation.

I must have missed that he never had his faith. As I recall, the movie started with him having already lost his faith, (or I thought that he had lost it), but I didn't realize that he never had his faith prior to that.

However, I don't think that would have changed my opinion of the movie. I never really connected to him emotionally, so whether or not he got his faith at the end probably wouldn't have made a difference to me.

Another Round was quite an amazing thing... which proves Mads Mikkelsen remains a good actor not only for his role from the Hannibal series ....
I could recommend a few more which I've seen recently

Perfumes (2019)
The Hedgehog (2009)
The Woman Next Door (1981)
The Great Darkened Days (2018)

Dogs Don't Wear Pants (2019)


The last 2 from the list will be worth your attention

I haven't heard of any of these movies, but I will check them out.

Thanks for the recommendations.

I watched a couple of movies that weren't recommended in this thread, but they've both been on my watchlist for a while, and I finally got around to watching them.

I watched The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) because I like time travel movies, and this one sounded like it might be interesting.

I liked this movie, but it was a bit far-fetched and too predictable. As soon as Makoto started using her time leaps for personal gain, I knew that there was going to be a lesson in this for her at the end, and it was going to be about her wasting all those leaps. And when I saw the number on her arm, I immediately knew that it was a counter, and she was running out of leaps.



But the whole idea of being able to just run and jump, and somehow go back in time, was a bit far-fetched. I would have liked a little bit of an explanation about the little walnut-shaped device.

I liked the part of the movie that focused on the relationships between the characters, but the time travel part of the movie could have been better.


I watched Your Name. (2016) because I remembered that it got great reviews when it came out, so it piqued my curiosity.

I didn't know anything about this movie beforehand, so it took me a while to figure out what was going on, and I'm still not quite sure how they figured out that they were switching bodies, but eventually the movie started to make sense. Once I figured out what was happening, this movie reminded me a little bit of The Lake House, with two people stuck in different timelines, who somehow need to find each other.

I liked how they were able to keep track of each other through the phone messages, and they even tried to help each other by finding little ways to enhance their lives. While I liked the way they figured out what was happening with the comet, and what they had to do to save the townspeople, the way they went about trying to evacuate the town was a bit far-fetched in that it didn't seem like it would have much of a chance at succeeding.

I thought the best scene was when they finally had a chance to meet each other, for only a few minutes, and they tried to write their names on their hands so they wouldn't forget each other.

This is a great movie with beautiful animation. I loved watching these two people trying to find each other.

No probs
Here is another one.... this one is again great... Turkish.
The Wild Pear Tree (2018)
Has quite a high rating on IMDB, has 10 wins and 15 nominations.
It is about the father son relationship and how people have to live in their own discontent since in some places there's a lack of opportunities. Just don't cry at the end of the movie please

This is another movie that I haven't heard of, so I added it to my watchlist. But I should warn you that I'm an easy crier at movies, so no promises about not crying at the end.

@Takoma11,
I watched Polytechnique (2009), but I found this movie on Tubi-TV, but it's in English, so I'm not sure if it's eligible for the Foreign Language Countdown. I watched it anyway because I remember hearing about this Montreal school shooting when it happened, and it was one that almost hit home for me.

At the time this happened, my friend, (who was also my college roommate), had recently transferred to a college in Montreal, and the initial reports here in New York were that there was a shooting at a college in Montreal, and several women were killed. My first thought was that my friend could have been one of them. (Fortunately, she was at a different college in Montreal at the time.)

There are some slow moments at the beginning of the movie, but it soon evens out, and it becomes a terrifying, but powerful movie. It has a very realistic feel, which makes it difficult to watch the events unfold.

I couple of things that I really liked about it were that (1) it was filmed in black and white, so the blood didn't have a gory feel like a horror movie, and (2) that the killer's name is never mentioned in the movie, so it doesn't glamorize his role in the killings.

I can't really call this an "enjoyable" watch, but it's an excellent film, and I'm glad that I watched it.

Thank you for the recommendation.

Serious Men (2020) You should find this interesting too. (Indian).
I assure you it is not a Bollywood type of movie
About a guy who makes his own child to learn things by heart and pretend in front of everyone that his son is a genius.
A pretty good movie !

That's weird--I could have sworn I remembered it being in French! Sorry for not double checking!

Yes--I think that it does a great job of showing what happened and the horror of it, but really staying focused on the victims. In particular the time given to the one male student who survived the massacre and his struggles with that. Glad you liked it!