The 100 Greatest Foreign Films

Fanny and Alexander (1983) Childhood, family, life, death, art, love, ghosts--the Bergman movie as Christmas feast for 30, all the way from the stuffed goose to the plum pudding. This luxuriously upholstered, three-hour-plus tour de force, Bergman's next-to-last, is both a summation of a career and the most user-friendly film he ever made. (M.A.)

Floating Weeds (1959) Director Yasujiro Ozu had one subject--people, or family (which is to say, people seen through time). He had one way of watching--at a distance, detached, attentive, respectful. There has never been a truer style, or one capable of seeing so much. Take a trip into Japanese cinema and you will never go back to the American with your old complacency and confidence. (D.T.)

Forbidden Games (1952) René Clément's flat-out exquisite movie about how children create a fantasy bulwark against reality. While Europe is hammered by the Second World War and grown-ups all around them seem petty and small, a newly orphaned, homeless young girl and a peasant boy find grace, beauty and solace in burying dead animals. (S.R.)

The Four Hundred Blows (1959} Raw, unpolished, shot on the run and true to the bone. Francois Truffaut's autobio directorial debut is still the most desperate movie ever made about childhood. (M.A.)

Gertrud (1964) In Carl Dreyer's last film, a married woman gives up her husband and a life of order for a younger man. a musician. It seems like just a small story, a women's picture of the sort that Joan Craw-ford made. But Dreyer sees the situ-ation as a model for every drama of liberty and happiness. In the end, as in the beginning, the great subject in movies is the human face as it begins to think and feel. (D.T.)

The Golden Coach (1952) Jean Renoir loved actors and the notion that acting was just a metaphor for life. He was also drawn to the subject of whether an artist or an actor can lead a real life--as opposed to following his calling. This is the enactment of those thoughts, with Anna Magnani as the woman in a troupe of traveling play-ers, loved by so many, yet, finally, incapable of loving people as much as she loves her work. (D.T.)

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) Pier Paolo Pasolini's cinéma vérité-style life of Christ features a cranky Jesus, the ferocious beauty of Southern Italy and a freaked-out, eclectic musical score with a little Prokofiev, a little Bach. A nifty, iconoclastic antidote to the cheeseball, velvet Jesus piety of The Greatest Story Ever Told. (S.R.)

Ikiru (1952) The word means "to live," but a petty bureaucrat discovers he is dying of cancer. He searches for company and meaning. This is somber, plain and everyday, but the realism is lit up by the performance of Takashi Shimura and the sympathy of director Akira Kurosawa. A movie to be seen after any one of those American epics involving massive, spectacular and inhuman slaughter. (D.T.)

Le Jour Se Lève (1939) Why is Jean Gabin holed up in a room with a gun? He has done a murder. Why? Because the world is rotten and hopeless. Director Marcel Carné's 1939 (all made in the studio) is different from Renoir's 1939 (The Rules of the Game, shot mostly on location). Starring two epitomes of worldliness--Arletty and Jules Berry. (D.T.)

Jules and Jim (1961) Boys meet girl. Boys love girl. One boy gets girl, then loses her. Other boy tries for girl. And so on, and so on. There's rarely been a wiser movie about unspoken love among messy, self-indulgent bohemians--or about love, period. Jeanne Moreau's Catherine is extraordinary: captivating, crackers, inspiring, tyrannical. Francois Truffaut's romantic masterpiece lives a universe apart from Paul Mazursky's Americanized version. Willie and Phil. (S.R.)

The Kingdom (1994) Lars von Trier's gruesome, poetic four-and-a-half hour movie (it was a miniseries in Denmark) about a haunted Danish hospital is a sting-ing rejoinder to anyone who says long foreign films are no fun. (M.A.)

Lamerica (1994) Neo-neorealist Gianni Amelio takes an irascible Italian yuppie and strands him in Albania, one of the most fabulously desolate and fearsome countries in the world and home to three-and-a-half million people who seem to want nothing more than to get the hell out. A political movie with a throbbing, pan-icky, bloody human heart. (M.A.)

Landscape in the Mist (1988) Two children wander across the Greek industrial wastelands to find an irrevocably lost father. Theo Angelopoulos's awesome, devastating movies make you hold your breath for fear of missing a frame; this one could change your life. (M.A.)

Last Year at Marienbad (1961) Or was it Friedrichshad? In Alain Resnais's enigma wrapped in an enigma--the visuals are like a 93-minute Calvin Klein commercial where no one's trying to sell you anything--gorgeous, ghostly sleepwalkers float through the hallways, lounges and restaurants of the grandest of grand hotels. Giorgio Albertazzi, for instance, can't remember whether, or even where, he and sleek Delphine Seyrig had an affair. Silly boy, with a face and trend-setting haircut like Seyrig's, who could possibly forget? (S.R.)

Lola (1961) A fairy-tale romance, but filmed in the gritty realism of Nantes, the seaport where director Jacques Demy grew up. It's a tribute to Max Ophüls, and a hymn to Anouk Aimée, as well as to comic irony, coincidence, wide screen, black and white and the sheer radiance of cinema. (D.T.)

Lola Montès (1955) Near death, the great 19th-century adventuress and courtesan Lola Montes sold herself to the circus as an attraction. This movie uses her circus act as a framework, and so Montes appears in tableaux from her life, allowing flashbacks to the past. This leads to a superb portrait of the struggle between love {or liberty) and confinement (or des-tiny). The last film--in CinemaScope--by the unrivaled Max Ophüls. (D.T.)

M (1931) Fritz Lang's famous prenoir creeper is one of the earliest and most profoundly compassionate serial killer thrillers ever made. Sixty years before Hannibal Lecter, Peter Lorre gave us a classic self-loathing, compulsive child slayer. (M.A.)

Masculin-Féminin (1966) Jean-Luc Godard's disarmingly sweet, intimate and blazingly smart exploration of The Mating Game. Even if the name Godard makes your temples pound, this movie can charm its way right up your leg. (M.A.)

Metropolis (1926) Lang's antiquated vision of a dystopia ripped up at the roots by class warfare may not be sophisticated politics, but the sci-fi images of mob con-duct and architectural madness remain unsurpassed. It's been plundered so often that even if you haven't seen it, you've sort of seen it. So really see it. (M.A.)

Le Million (1931) René Clair loved prettiness, song and music, comic confu-sion and Paris--they are all here in this delicious confection about young lovers in search of a winning lottery ticket. (D.T.)

Murmur of the Heart (1971) Louis Malle's sunny, beautifully controlled comedy about the sensual coming-of-age of a 14-year-old, jazz-obsessed boy radiates the knowing, worldly sensuality of a good Colette yarn. The controversy at the time of the film's release about the theme of "incest" was pure flapdoodle--this is not what the movie's about. Still, Lord help sons if all mothers were as gorgeous and blithely sensual as Lea Massari. (S.R.)

Napoléon (1927) An eye-roasting epic of the type even David Lean never made. Abel Gance used every filmmaking trope in the book and then invented a few of his own. Keep an eye peeled for surrealist nutcase Antonin Artaud as Marat. (M.A.)

Night and Fog (1955) Yes, you've heard already--the concentration camps were a bad thing. But Alain Resnais's documentary on Auschwitz is only 31 minutes--so you can make time. (D.T.)

The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's wonder-working paisan fable about a platoon of Italian peas-ants in the last days of WWII escaping their ravaged village in the night and searching for the liberating American forces. Filled with those lyrical, meaning-packed moments you could grow old, die and turn to dust waiting to see in American movies. (M.A.)

1900 (1977) This is Bernardo Bertolucci's War and Peace. Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda and Donald Sutherland amid Italy's political vomitings from the beginning of the century to the ill-fated rise of communism, all shot tike a Flemish painting and laid out like a Parmesan wedding banquet. (M.A.)

Nosferatu (1922) F.W. Murnau's film of the Dracula tale was the first of its kind and is still the scariest, moodiest vampire film ever made. The original surrealists loved the famous title card that read, "When he crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him." The bald, rat-faced Count Orlock is played by an actor named "Max Schreck," which in German translates as "maximum terror"; who this man really was is still a mystery. (M.A.)

La Notte (1961) Antonioni's examination of the pathology of modem marriage, lust and alienation, all beheld in the space of a day. Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni are the couple--and here is moviemaking as layered and complex as the best modern fiction. (D.T.)

Pandora's Box (1928) Minor Hollywood actress went to Germany and became the supreme femme fatale, Lulu, in an adaptation of two of Franz Wedekind's plays. G.W. Pabst directed. Who she? She Louise Brooks--still undefeated champion of the lethal look. (D.T.)

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) Danish giant Carl Dreyer re-creates a medieval tug-of-war between ignorant orthodoxy and human grace, almost entirely in close-ups. As Joan, Maria Falconetti will never be forgot-ten; look out for Antonin Artaud again as a sympathetic priest. (M.A.)

Persona (1966) An actress (Liv Ullmann) stops speaking, on stage. In her breakdown, she is cared for by a nurse (Bibi Andersson). The nurse talks, acting up for the actress. Slowly, their characters become intertwined, dependent, in love and full of enmity. This is Ingmar Bergman's most lucid analysis of the psyche that has to be actor or audience, and both. (D.T.)

Pierrot le Fou (1965) Jean-Luc Godard's bitter homage to Hollywood, to painting, to the novel, to the South of France, and to his own wife, Anna Karina, who was leaving him when he made this film. This is Godard's adventure film--film noir in the blaze of noon. Godard deconstructed film in the '60s, and in ignoring him now we have all agreed to be blind, stupid and uneducated. (D.T.)

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