The 100 Greatest Foreign Films

Playtime (1967) Jacques Tad's Monsieur Hulot finds himself in the ulti-mate modem city. No one ever conceived or built sight gags with more care, and so these wondrous comic spectacles clash intriguingly with the deter-mined, organized and humorless insanity of the city. (D.T.)

Raise the Red Lantern (1991) This color-drenched melodrama of a young concubine serves as a lesson in social order, love, resignation and the kinship of women. Zhang Yimou's film is part of the recent flowering of Chinese cinema, and Gong Li, his actress, is established here as one of the great stars. (D.T.)

Ran (1985) Akira Kurosawa should have retired after this awesome transcription of King Lear (mixed with a little Macbeth), which, thank God, jettisons the texts and just tells a helluva story. The battle scenes will unhinge your jaw. (M.A.)

Rashomon (1950) Four strange people in feudal Japan tell self-serving versions of the same incident: the rape of a nobleman's bride by a lusty out-law and the subsequent death of the nobleman. A classic about no less a subject than the slipperiness of truth. Hollywood's remake was titled, aptly, The Outrage. (S.R.)

The Red and the White (1967) Bolsheviks and counter-revolutionaries battle it out in the hills along the Volga. Abstract and monolithic, and I mean that in a good way. Hungarian Miklós Jancsó makes movies without charac-ters but with crowds you can actually identify with. The power struggles of history are played out in mesmerizing, long, uncut tracking shots. A steam-roller movie--it's a visceral antidote to the easy homilies and melodrama of most antiwar films. (M.A.)

Red Desert (1964) It's Monica Vitti again on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Michelangelo Antonioni's painterly study of social disintegration, Italian-style. Depending on your mind's state, the movie's harrowing evocation and inspection of despair could soak into your bones, promote hilarity or send you scrambling for the nearest bottle of Prozac. (S.R.)

Repulsion (1965) Roman Polanski's jittery thriller takes a clinician's delight in documenting the process of a lonely, exquisitely beautiful manicurist (Catherine Deneuve) going nuts in her apartment. Queasiest moments: the dead rabbit, the hands coming out of the walls, and Deneuve slashing a guy to kingdom come. With its cool, crazy Chico Hamilton score, this is first-class Grand Guignol, tailor-made to watch with someone you love to grab. (S.R.)

Rocco and His Brothers (1960) Or, Why I'm Glad To Have Been an Only Child. In Luchino Visconti's sprawling saga (surely an influence on The Godfather), fate uproots and urbanizes a peasant mother and her five sons, most of whom go to hell in a handbasket in the big city. Tragic, wrenching, operatic. (S.R.)

La Roue (1922) Napoleon is Abel Gance's best known film--because it has been restored and given a new musical score. But La Roue is at least as good, a love story about a locomotive driver--it's over-the-top, sentimental, yet it shows the passion of story, imagery and cutting in those early 1920s when the motion picture was the new craze. (D.T.)

The Rules of the Game (1939) The working definition of tragicomedy (an un-American form based on the notion that nothing ever means only one thing). Europe in 1939, The edge of disaster as seen through the mishaps of a country house party. Jean Renoir directed and starred, playing the good-natured but bumbling friend to all and the helpless trigger of tragedy. Nearly 60 years later, this movie is years ahead of film today. (D.T.)

Sansho Dayu (1954) In 11th-century Japan, an exiled governor's wife gets sold into prostitution, his son and daughter into slavery. Director Kenji Mizoguchi knows no superior in using image and composition to express emotional profundities. If there is anywhere in film a sequence more throat-catching than the one in which the long-suffering son is reunited with his martyred mother, who is too far gone to remember him, bring it on. (S.R.)

Senso (1954) Luchino Visconti loved the 19th century--clothes, decor, opera, aristocratic ways, foppish men and doomed women--and all are in the tale of a fatal love between Farley Granger and Alida Valli. (D.T.)

Seven Samurai (1954) A Japanese village of the 16th century is threatened by bandits. The villagers hire seven samurai. It sums to rain. Akira Kurosawa filmed it, and battle, swordplay, action and spectacle have never been the same again. (D.T.)

Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964) A Ukrainian epic set in the Carpathian Mountains, this landmark movie directed by Sergo Paradjanov feels like it was actually shot deep in the pagan, premovie past. (M.A.)

Shame (1968) The Bergman movie for people who hate Bergman movies--no symbolism, no spiritual agony, just a very real husband and wife (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann) trying to stay alive when war suddenly explodes right into their front yard (the country this takes place in is unspecified). What happens when you find a dead paratrooper hanging from a tree, and the woods near your house are in flames? A great war film for people whose country has never been invaded. (M.A.)

Shoah (1985) Yes, you've been told this before--the concentration cramps were a wicked thing. Still, Claude Lanzmann's documentary is only 8½ hours--so you've got the time. So many lost theirs. (D.T.)

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) Ingmar Bergman, in an uncharacteristically Mozartian mood, sends in the clowns as pairs of mismatched lovers spark, misfire, scheme, wreak emotional havoc and, in the end, reconfigure. An elegantly witty, deeply moving work of tragicomic art, it inspired Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music. You may find its scalpel-like Scandinavian irony preferable to the self-satisfied Gallic schematics of La Ronde. (S.R.)

Solaris (1972) A forgotten space station's crew is haunted by their dead loved ones. In making this film, which includes the most heartrending antigravity scene in film history, Andrei Tarkovsky reinvented science fiction. (M.A.)

The Spider's Stratagem (1970) The atmosphere is so cryptic and the behaviors so furtive in Bernardo Bertolucci's take on a Jorge Luis Borges short story that you find yourself as baffled as the hero investigating the 30-year-old slaying of his antifascist father. The star is a cipher, but Alida Valli supplies more than presence, even if she seems startled to realize she is no longer the sleek enchantress of The Third Man or The Paradine Case. The whole thing is so gorgeously color-drenched you may want to paint your walls in homage. (S.R.)

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) Why aren't there more great movies about kids? Kid actors, for starters. This wonderfully insular movie about the power of imagination, a companion to Forbidden Games, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Night of the Hunter, presents dolefully radiant, poised Ana Torrent as a young girl who runs away from her village home in search of the Frankenstein monster after seeing the Boris Karloff movie for the first time. Torrent's resemblance to the little actress drowned by Karloff in the original only adds to the weirdness. (S.R.)

Strike (1924) Sergei Eisenstein was a graphic artist on a par with Picasso, and a member of experimental theater groups in the new Soviet Union. All these talents led him to film, the new means of reaching the public through image, montage and symbol. And so for a few years Soviet cinema was on fire with its enthusiasm for an art of all the people. The epically titled film is about a strike. (D.T.)

Throne of Blood (1957) Noh meets Shakespeare. Akira Kurosawa's samurai take on Macbeth is spooky, elemental, visceral. The bloodcurdling finale features Toshiro Mifune pierced, St. Sebastian-like, by arrows. (S.R.)

Through a Glass Darkly (1961) A family vacations on a Swedish island--but the grown daughter (the astonishing Harriet Andersson) is a borderline schizo who has visions of God as a giant spider. Bergman goes for the throat. (M.A.)

Tokyo Stay (1953) Ozu's quietest, most devastating left hook, in which an elderly couple discover there's no room for them in their self-involved children's busy lives. Where other directors babble like brats, Ozu whispers like a wise man. (M.A.)

Tristana (1970) Luis Buñuel reunites with his belle de jour, Catherine Deneuve, in this less-famous, equally perverse meditation on sex, Catholicism, obsession, aging, Franco-ism and amputation. Deneuve is an implacably obscure object of desire both for her elderly guardian and for a young, studly suitor. The claustrophobic, Hollywood-spoofing perfection of the photography, sets and costumes only heightens the surrealistic kick. (S.R.)

Two English Girls (1971) A young Frenchman goes to England and meets two sisters (both passionate, creative and tragically inclined). His love for them lasts over the years, as he shifts from one to the other. This is Francois Truflaut's most subtle work, pieced together out of fragments, but with underlying emotional patterns rising to the surface. With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Kika Markham and Stacey Tendeter. One of the great testaments to the elusiveness of happiness. (D.T.)

Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) Kenji Mizoguchi's gentle but breathtaking medieval Japanese ghost story. Two fortune-seeking fools launch out into a chaotic world where chance, vanity and cruelty twist their destinies. The film is so ethereal and mysterious that every scene seems to take place in the comer of your eye. (M.A.)

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) Jacques Demy was the last filmmaker anywhere who made movies about nothing but the plea-sure and grace of the medium. This is a love story in which all the dialogue is sung (to music by Michel Legrand). Enchanting, ravishing, and with Catherine Deneuve in that blush of youth that signaled the fairy princess. Demy is dead now, but surely he was the man who could have filmed Stephen Sondheim. (D.T.)

Vampyr (1932) Dreyer does a vampire movie, more or less, and comes up with the equivalent of a choked nightmare endured while sleepwalking across the bottom of a stagnant lake. Jeepers. Creepers. (M.A.)

Viridiana (1961) Luis Bunuel's scathingly funny, surrealist tale of a religious novice (Silvia Pinal) violated by her horny uncle (Fernando Rey) is a field day for lapsed Catholics. The Spanish master seldom wielded his impeccable technique, his anticlerical, antifascist savagely or his withering view of sexuality to such devastating effect. Favorite moment: the orgy of beggars staged as an obscene parody of the Last Supper. (S.R.)

Weekend (1967) Godard's apocalyptic vision of modem society, where life is one long traffic jam and a fender dent is reason enough to blow away the road hog who put it there. Cannibalism, Marxists, Emily Bronte, sex-- what more could you want? (M.A.)

Wings of Desire (1988) Quotidian life in wall-divided Berlin as seen through the eyes and ears of sympathetic angels in overcoats. A great, priceless gift to filmgoers, however shamelessly ripped off for that R.E.M. "Everybody Hurts" video. (M.A.)

The World of Apu (1959) The concluding part of the Apu trilogy, in which the boy has grown and gone to the big city, Calcutta, and is married. Then comes tragedy and recovery. With this trilogy, Satyajit Ray made India a film-making nation for the rest of the world--and helped to show Western audiences the potential for a life of the spirit in the observation of a camera. (D.T.)

Zéro de Conduite (1933) Jean Vigo's notorious, semisurreal paean to schoolyard anarchy. Four wild kids rebel against their boarding school's oppressive rules and end up provoking a full-scale revolution. A graceful, hilarious testament to the snot-nosed preteen in all of us. (M.A.)

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