25 Best Non-English language films

In response to Edward Copeland's Choosing the best non-English language films, I present my ballot (my top 25 out of the nominated films):

1. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)

Flat out the most romantic movie of all time, Umbrellas bursts forth at the seams with exuberant color and all the freshness of youthful visions of the world. The final scene's saudade is eviscerating not because it's tragic, but because it isn't. An unrivalled emotional experience.

2. Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)

An intimate epic of resistance that details the codes by which people live under occupation. The opening shot is as powerful and artful as openers get - Nazis marching, triumphantly, in front of the Arc de Triomphe. An epilogue that turns the story of a few individuals into the story of a nation. Tragic, brutal, and human.

3. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)

The mastery of this film is beyond my capacity for speech.

4. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002)
5. The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)

What really thrills about Battle of Algiers after all of these years is not that you feel in the midst of events; that's been done too much since to feel freshly radical. Battle's amplified intensity comes from being in the midst of events. It's not spectatorship but intimacy here; Pontecorvo's camera gives up showing in favor of participation. This goes for both sides of the fight - we're as intimate with the general giving a press conference as we are with the young woman cutting her hair to slip past security checkpoints. This is radical, because filmmakers mostly align themselves with the watchers. Pontecorvo, instead, implicates us in both sides of the conflict.

6. Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, 1994)

After seeing this for the first time, I turned to the person sitting next to me and said "If it was playing again right now, I would definitely stay."

7. Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog, 1979)

The opening shots of mummified human remains, as my friend said to me afterwards, is like the secret of vampire lore unlocked. "We all die, and these are the stories human beings tell ourselves to help us make sense of the fact that we die." There's nothing left but for me to agree.

8. Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967)

The perfect comic exploration of the "man vs. nature" archetype, where nature is the artificial world that man has created.

9. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
10. Rashômon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
11. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
12. Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)

Though it occassionally teeters on the verge of cloying, it consistently comes out on the right side by virtue a real emotional intimacy with wounded characters who need a bit of a push to have the courage to pursue their happiness.

13. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)

Mein Gott! That opening sequence! Rivalled only by the apocalyptic insanity of Kinski as Aguirre.

14. Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
15. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)

Not the film people think it is, but a much better one: a sweet mini-romance.

16. The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

A medieval morality play both set in and a product of a world in dire need of such stories. A tale of sacrifice and the resurgence of life, of mankind's possibility for goodness in a world run amok with evil. Simple and sublime.

17. Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)

A few clues for latecomers: The Madison. The Louvre, quickly. Anna Karina.

18. The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 1959)
19. The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
20. Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939)

A film that builds and builds and builds and builds... until the final edit, a moment of sublime, impossible loss - and beauty.

21. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2001)

Like every time I ever fell in love, only so much more beautiful (if just as tragic).

22. M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

Lang's balloons floating in the air and shots of empty stairwells are a masterclass in suspense and the horror of the viewer's imagination. M turns "In the Hall of the Mountain King" into the every parent's worst nightmare.

23. Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)
24. Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)
25. All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)


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and the 25 best that didn't make the nominees list (in rough order of my preference)*:
An Actor's Revenge (Kon Ichikawa, 1963)
Veronika Voss (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)
Tesis (Alejandro Amenábar, 1996)
The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973)
The Hunt (Carlos Saura, 1966)
In Vanda's Room (Pedro Costa, 2000)
Pepi Luci Bom y otras chicas del montón (Pedro Almodóvar, 1980)
L'Âge D'Or (Luis Buñuel, 1930)
Queimada (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1969)
Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle, 1958)
A Woman is a Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, 1961)
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Elio Petri, 1970)
When A Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960)
Sauvage Innocence (Philippe Garrel, 2001)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, 2000)
The Closet (Francis Veber, 2001)
Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935)
The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973)
I Am Cuba (Mikheil Kalatozishvili, 1964)
Two Women (Vittorio de Sica, 1960)
Even Dwarves Started Small (Werner Herzog, 1970)
Sicilia! (Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, 1999)
Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Julio Medem, 1998)
Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967)
Tuvalu (Veit Helmer, 1999)


* I'm not including La Jetée because it's technically not a feature.


To say nothing of Pather Panchali, Flowers of Shanghai, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Viridiana, Vacas, Charulata, Sholay, The Kingdom, and LOADS of films I've forgotten or haven't yet seen.

Update: Results!

Top 100 Movies of All Time (a work in progress)

I've been trying to make an all-time Top 100 Films list for months, at least. What I've found is that the task is impossible. At some point, weighing the relative virtues of 100 or 150 films becomes an arbitrary task, with numbers assigned for the sake of their assignation. In some regard I prefer the unranked list approach that Ted has taken with his list, but the lack of ranks leaves too much to our imagination; less of Ted comes through for his not having made these arbitrary designations.
Although there's no way to compare the relative virtues of Daisy Kenyon and Sauvage Innocence, or Duck Soup and Days of Heaven, we can hint at our levels of investment in these films. On their own the numbers are meaningless, but taken together they can sketch out our secret selves via the cinema. One can tell a lot about my formal approach to storytelling from my list, but also, perhaps, that I'm a bit too empathetic toward heartbreak (see: #1 film Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and my probable over-ratings of Amelie, and Brokeback Mountain). You might not know that I hold high hopes for future(s) of digital cinematography, but my inclusion of Inland Empire might hint at this. That color is an area of aesthetic interest might bleed through when Vertigo and The Red Shoes appear near one another on the list.
Some of the arbitrariness of the list order is determined by aesthetics of listmaking itself. I couldn't bear to place Triumph of the Will next to Schindler's List, so I bumped up Burn! (aka Quiemada) to take the space between them (though it probably should have been well above both). Band of Outsiders seems excessive just below Breathless, so Alien was demoted to split them apart.
Looking at this list its hard for me to tell even what my rationale was in many cases. I think there's an overrepresentation of Godard and Kubrick in the Top 60. Some of my favorite filmmakers didn't make the list at all... and I put not one but two Spielberg movies in my list? Seriously? I see movies I love listed below movies I barely remember loving, and movies I think are overrated rated above films close to my heart. What's going on here, though, is that the listmaking process is also an exploration of memory. Re-viewing The Searchers recently was a revelation, even though I've seen it projected three times before, because it reminded me of how rich the film is; over time the details of a film's richness fade and only vague recollections remain. So Veronika Voss slides out of Top 10 because I haven't had a recent enough viewing, while An Actor's Revenge remains high precisely because the details of plot have faded from my mind -- but some of the most impressively composed shots in the history of cinema remain.
With those qualifiers, I now present my current Top 100 Movies of All Time as a work-in-progress; I will certainly change my mind on half of these films by the time I hit the publish button.
I should also note that this list doesn't include films I haven't seen. While that sounds obvious, it's an important qualifier for me in particular, as I've found ways to avoid most of the "canonical" films I'm supposed to have seen (including many in my areas of interest). Chalk it up to taking more specialized classes in lieu of intro film classes in college, and an idiosyncratic set of viewing choices since.


Top 100 Movies of All Time (a work in progress)
[as of 7/11/07]


1. Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)
2. La Jetee (Chris Marker, 1962)
3. Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)
4. To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)
5. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
6. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
7. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar, 2002)
8. Elephant (Gus van Sant, 2003)
9. Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
10. Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967)
11. Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, 1994)
12. Veronika Voss (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)
13. An Actor's Revenge (Kon Ichikawa, 1963)
14. Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
15. Rashômon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
16. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
17. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
18. The Host (Bong Joon-ho, 2006)
19. Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Werner Herzog, 1979)
20. Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936)
21. Tesis (Alejandro Amenábar, 1996)
22. The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
23. Pandora's Box (Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1929)
24. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
25. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
26. Design For Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)
27. Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (F. W. Murnau, 1922)
28. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920)
29. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
30. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
31. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
32. L'Âge D'Or (Luis Buñuel, 1930)
33. The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
34. The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973)
35. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
36. United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006)
37. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
38. Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle, 1958)
39. Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947)
40. Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
41. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
42. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
43. Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)
44. 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002)
45. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
46. Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991)
47. The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller, 1980)
48. Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967)
49. High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973)
50. Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
51. A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
52. A Woman is a Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, 1961)
53. Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (Pedro Almodóvar, 1980)
54. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F. W. Murnau, 1927)
55. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)
56. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)
57. Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929)
58. Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)
59. The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)
60. On the Town (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1949)
61. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
62. Zéro de conduite: Jeunes diables au collège (Jean Vigo, 1933)
63. If... (Lindsay Anderson, 1968)
64. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
65. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
66. O Lucky Man! (Lindsay Anderson, 1973)
67. Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960)
68. Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel, 2005)
69. Osaka Elegy (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936)
70. Shindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
71. Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, 1964)
72. Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935)
73. Queimada (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1969)
74. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939)
75. Unsere Afrikareise (Peter Kubelka, 1966)
76. Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)
77. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Elio Petri, 1970)
78. Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006)
79. When A Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960)
80. The Hunt (Carlos Saura, 1966)
81. C'était un rendez-vous (Claude Lelouch, 1976)
82. Sauvage Innocence (Philippe Garrel, 2001)
83. Au Hazard Balthasar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
84. Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998)
85. The Party (Blake Edwards, 1968)
86. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953)
87. Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)
88. Even Dwarves Started Small (Werner Herzog, 1970)
89. Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)
90. Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)
91. Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, 2000)
92. All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)
93. Arnulf Rainer (Peter Kubelka, 1960)
94. The Closet (Francis Veber, 2001)
95. Bunny Lake Is Missing (Otto Preminger, 1965)
96. The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)
97. Days of Glory (Jacques Tourneur, 1944)
98. Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)
99. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000)
100. Idiocracy (Mike Judge, 2006)

Top 20 Films

Inspired by a recent two-week-old post at Long Pauses, I've posted the current Top 20 films from my not-quite-finished Top 100 list (I'll never truly finish, of course, but I'd settle for having a Top 100 that I can commit to on the day it's posted). The top 18 are pretty well set; spots 19 and 20 could be these two, or any of about 15 other films. I've felt free to break the "one film per director" rule - and the only one who did was Lubitsch (barely). Note also that most of these I haven't seen in some time. The major exception is Sátántangó, which I saw for the first time only last weekend; I discovered Army of Shadows and Rules of the Game in 2006. Regardless, this should give you a good idea of my cinematic approach (as a critic and otherwise).

My Top 20 Films:

1. Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)
2. La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
3. Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)
4. To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)
5. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002)
6. Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
7. Elephant (Gus van Sant, 2003)
8. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
9. Veronika Voss (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)
10. Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
11. Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967)
12. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
13. An Actor's Revenge (Kon Ichikawa, 1963)
14. Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
15. Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, 1994)
16. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
17. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
18. Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Werner Herzog, 1979)
19. Design For Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)
20. Pandora's Box (Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1929)

You'll notice that most of these are definitively big-screen experiences - I won't even watch Lawrence of Arabia on DVD because of Lean's use of the full canvas of the big screen, and most of these shouldn't be watched on the small screen. Also notice that the color films tend to make very specific use of color interactions and harmonies (a former area of study... hey, where's The Red Shoes?) In addition to color, you'll see some of my other obsessions: (romantic) loss, revolution, circular time, and perhaps most significantly, a particular approach to storytelling through the camera - not that I can articulate exactly what that might be.