A brief introduction:

World cinema is a term used primarily in English language speaking countries to refer to the films and film industries of non-English speaking countries. It is therefore often used interchangeably with the term foreign film. However, both world cinema and foreign film could be taken to refer to the films of all countries other than one's own, regardless of native language.

Technically, foreign film does not mean the same as foreign language film, but the inference, particularly in the U.S., is that a foreign film is not only foreign in terms of the country of production, but also in terms of the language used. As such, the use of the term foreign film for films produced in the UK, Australia, Canada or other English speaking countries would be uncommon.

In other English speaking countries, it would be extremely unlikely to class films made in the U.S. as foreign films, or belonging to World cinema, as American films are reasonably dominant in all English-language markets.

In a nutshell:

Post your foreign movie recommendations, opinions or pictures here. It could belong to any genre, though admittedly, I may post more about the horror category in particular, more than the rest.

Giallo List

The film genre that emerged from these novels in the 1960s began as literal adaptations of the books, but soon began taking advantage of modern cinematic techniques to create a unique genre which veered into horror and psychological thrillers. These films, particularly 1970s classics by directors such as Sergio Martino, Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento and Mario Bava, are only defined as “gialli” in the English-language use of the term; in Italy they are usually described as thrillers or, as a genre, “thrilling” or “giallo all’italiana.” In the English-speaking world the term “giallo” has become established as an adjective to “thriller” and “horror.”

“Giallo” films are characterized by extended murder sequences featuring excessive bloodletting, stylish camerawork and unusual musical arrangements. The literary whodunit element is retained, but combined with modern slasher horror, while being filtered through Italy’s longstanding tradition of opera and staged grand guignol drama. They also generally include liberal amounts of nudity and sex.

Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key(Italian: Il tuo vizio è una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave) 1972




This, the fourth Giallo to be directed by Sergio Martino between the years 1971 and 1973 is one of the best Italian horror films that I've seen and a must for cult fans! I saw Sergio Martino's excellent The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh recently, and although I wasn't expecting as much from Your Vice is a Locked Door and Only I Have the Key; I was surprised to find that it might even be better than the aforementioned Giallo classic! The film takes it's ridiculously long title from a written phrase in The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh, but it's plot comes mostly from Edgar Allen Poe's classic story 'The Black Cat'. The way that the film uses Poe's story is unlike any other film that's used it before, and that is one of the reasons why this is such a great film. Sergio Martino fuses Poe's backdrop with a rural-set Giallo plot line, which follows burnt out alcoholic writer Oliviero Rouvigny as he starts a decent into madness when one of his mistresses is found brutally slaughtered. Things heat up again when his niece, Floriana, turns up and ends up pitting him against his wife Irena in order for her to get what she came for.

Edwige Fenech is undoubtedly a beautiful woman, and that has never been truer than in this film! I've seen her in a few films, but her short hair cut here puts her on a whole different level; and even if she'd never made another film, she'd be one of the stars of cult cinema just for her appearance here. The cute little actress is more than just a pretty face, too, as she more than holds her own in the excellent central trio. Luigi Pistilli (from Mario Bava's Bay of Blood) is great as the lead male, while Anita Strindberg ('Who Saw Her Die?') comes out of nowhere and ends taking the lead in the final third. It's not just Edwige providing the beauty here either, the cinematography is incredible and Sergio Martino ensures that Your Vice looks gorgeous throughout, and the music, courtesy of Bruno Nicolai; completes the assault on the senses. The plot is very open, with most of it coming from character interactions rather than actual plot points. This actually does the film a favour, however, as the characters are well defined and all their motives make sense. It's not all that bloody...but Your Vice is so invigorating that it hardly matters. If you're into cult films - don't miss this one!--The Void

The Girl Who Knew Too Much(Italian: La ragazza che sapeva troppo) 1963



La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo/The Girl who Knew too Much(1963) is the first of the giallo genre that didn't blossom until the late 1960s. Also the final film by Mario Bava to be done in black and white. Although a Giallo, the film follows the plot lines of the more traditional mystery story with a few twists. The film that uses the perverse and violent elements of the Gialli or Giallo is Blood & Black Lace(1964). Mario Bava's next film, Blood and Black Lace(1964) is less interested in story and more interested in mood and style. The plot involves a woman who misinterprets the meaning of a murder she witnesses. The first horror picture that John Saxon was in.

Bava in a rare instance uses naturalistic lighting. Usually the lighting in a Bava film is drenched in artful color. The only other film by Mario Bava to use naturalistic lighting is Rabid Dogs(1974). Lacks the sex and violence that dominates the gialli novels. The director was fascinated by the deception of appearences in this film and in his entire filmography. He seemed to have little optimism about human behavior or human nature. There are only three murders that occur in the film while the others happen before the story begins.

The Girl who Knew Too Much(1963) deals with Bava's favorite theme of greed. The murderer before being overcome with bloodlust does these deeds because of obsession with money. Greed is the seed of destruction for the characters in Blood & Black Lace(1964), A Bay of Blood(1971), and Rabid Dogs(1974). Part Alfred Hitchcock and part Edgar Wallace. The acting in the film is good. Leticia Roman is excellent as the naive and attractive Nora Davis. Mario Bava was not interested in doing the film but due to money reason directed it anyway.

Downplays the romantic subplot involving Nora Davis and Dr. Marcello Bassi. The scenes that uses suggestions of drug use were cut for the USA release. I love the scene where Nora sets up a booby trap to catch the murderer with disasterous results. The camera was in love with the figure of Leticia Roman during the scene at the beach while panning from her face to her feet. The short love scene between Nora and Marcello has a short spurt of eroticism. One of the writers who worked on the film was Django director, Sergio Corbucci. John Saxon does some fine acting as the leading man.

Mario Bava and John Saxon did not get along due to many misunderstandings during filming. The director it seems didn't think too highly of actors or actresses. Dante Dipaolo plays the newspaper reporter with sympathy. The use of the tape recorder by the murderer is cleaver. Valentina Cortese gets the top acting honors as the mysterious Laura Terrani. The discovery of the murderer is one of the film's main highlights. Impressed Dario Argento when he did The Bird with the Crystal Plumage(1969) and thus being responsible for the longevity and success of the Giallo in Italy. --marquis de cinema

Blood and Black Lace (Italian: Sei donne per l'assassino)



An upper-crust European fashion salon is having a devil of a time keeping girls working for it in this unique, visually breath-taking Mario Bava film. One fashion model after another dies a horrible death: one strangled, another failing to accept the gauntlet too soon, one having her face pushed into a hot iron, and so on. After watching this film, there will be almost no doubt at all how much Mario Bava influenced modern directors - and no one more particularly than Dario Argento. Bava's use of color, his choice of murder victims, his mystery of cat with mouse and then dog chasing cat(police on trail of murderer) are all signature trademarks of Argento's work. Blood and Black Lace is perhaps the most stylish, stunning film I have seen in terms of how color is used in every frame. From the opening credits with a great rhythmic score, hues of every shade permeate the screen. Bava uses colors like no other director I have ever seen attempt to do so with the exception of Argento. Watch Suspiria by Argento and closely look at how he uses blues and reds and tell me Bava is not written all over it! Blood and Black Lace has all the colors and it is really like a moving canvas. Bava is the artist controlling lighting, shading, and depth perception. I know I am gushing, but this is one beautiful film. The story, at least for me, is a secondary matter. It is a good story. I knew who the murderer was fairly quickly, but Bava does throw in some red herrings that will at least have you second guessing yourself. The actors are all pretty good. Cameron Mitchell plays a guy running the salon with his wife, played VERY ably by the lovely Eva Bartok. I had trouble taking my eyes off her as well as the rest of the beautiful European models. Luciano Pigozzi has a small role. You might remember him as the Italian character actor with the Peter Lorre face and eyes. Blood and Black Lace is certainly one of Bava's best films. Not his best though - Black Sunday wins that hands down. But this film is definitely his greatest in terms of artistic merit. It is a visual masterpiece and Bava deserves so much more credit as an innovative, creative force in film than he receives. --baronblood

Porky's is Canadian, so does that count as a foreign film?

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMjEwNzMzMzUxOV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODcyODA4MQ@@._V1._SY314_CR11,0,214,314_.jpg



Welcome to the Sticks - French Comedy

Although living a comfortable life in Salon-de-Provence, a charming town in the South of France, Julie has been feeling depressed for a while. To please her, Philippe Abrams, a post office administrator, her husband, tries to obtain a transfer to a seaside town, on the French Riviera, at any cost. The trouble is that he is caught red-handed while trying to scam an inspector. Philippe is immediately banished to the distant unheard of town of Bergues, in the Far North of France. Leaving his child and wife behind, the crucified man leaves for his frightening destination, a dreadfully cold place inhabited by hard-drinking, unemployed rednecks, speaking an incomprehensible dialect called Ch'ti. Philippe soon realizes that all these ideas were nothing but prejudices and that Bergues is not synonymous with hell...

English subtitles

Soul Kitchen - a wonderful German comedy

Soul Kitchen centers on a likable but hopelessly disorganized Greek restauranteur, Zinos, whose cafe is second home to a motley crew of lovable eccentrics. When his girlfriend Nadine up and moves to Shanghai, a love-sick Zinos decides to fly after her, leaving his restaurant in the hands of his unreliable ex-con brother, Illias. Both decisions prove disastrous; Illias gambles away the restaurant to a shady real estate agent, and Zinos finds Nadine with a new lover. If the brothers can stop arguing and get it together, the Soul Kitchen might still have one last chance at staying in business. The mayhem that follows is a hilariously entertaining story of self-realization, set to an irresistibly soulful soundtrack.

Tamara Drewe - British Comedy

When Tamara Drewe sashays back to the bucolic village of her youth, life for the locals is thrown tail over teakettle. Tamara--once an ugly duckling--has been transformed into a devastating beauty (with the help of plastic surgery). As infatuations, jealousies, love affairs and career ambitions collide among the inhabitants of the neighbouring farmsteads, Tamara sets a contemporary comedy of manners into play using the oldest magic in the book--sex appeal.

Sette orchidee macchiate di rosso (1972) IMDb



Seven Blood Stained Orchids is a textbook early 70's giallo. There are no real surprises in this one, it plays by the genre rules closely – a black leather glove wearing maniac picks off a succession of women in a variety of ways while the police are ineffectual and an amateur sleuth saves the day. This is the type of synopsis that could be given to umpteen gialli of the period. Orchids displays in abundance both the strengths and weaknesses of the sub-genre.

The story involves the murders of a succession of women who are killed by a maniac who leaves ornamental half-moons in their dead hands. The reason for this carnage has something to do with events revolving around a hotel one night several years previously...

The murder routines are standard giallo material. Beautiful women, often in a state of undress, are killed by a variety of methods – club, strangulation, drowning, power-drill, etc. It is, of course, quite a sleazy set up but there is no point denying the frisson of these scenes. The mix of sex and violence is pretty much essential to giallo cinema. The first two murders in particular are examples of this – in the first, a prostitute is beaten to death with a club and left for dead half-naked with her breasts covered in blood; in the second, an artist is strangled but this time paint fills the role of the red stuff, as it drips onto her chest like she was a Jackson Pollock canvas. Later in the movie Lenzi introduces death by power-drill which may or may not be a first but it certainly is no surprise from the man who would go on to make a few notorious cannibal movies. In fairness, some of the murder routines display a genuine understanding of suspense. In particular, the demise of the madwoman (Rossella Falk) is claustrophobic and genuinely creepy. Sadly, Lenzi decides to have some of the murders committed off-screen. This isn't particularly clever, as the murders in gialli are so central to the experience that having any off-screen just seems lazy.

I guess with its emphasis on female slaughter, Seven Blood Stained Orchids is a good example of a giallo that could be considered misogynistic. I'm not really going to argue this general point one way or the other, except to say that things never get too lurid and, as is often the way with giallo cinema, the women characters are a hell of a lot more interesting than the men. Orchids is no exception here. Antonio Sabato is, at best, adequate and the police and authority figures that make up the majority of the other males in the film are all pretty dull; the exception being Barrett, the junkie homosexual. The heteros aren't too interesting at any rate. The women, on the other hand, are much more absorbing. Uschi Glas is a far better lead than Sabato; Rossella Falk - a very unusual looking woman - is unforgettable as the disturbed patient in the asylum; and Marisa Mell in the double role of the identical twins is just, well, stunningly beautiful really. Horror cinema favours women but giallo cinema actively depends upon them, this film is no exception.

For fans of the giallo, this is good fun. It's sleazy, violent and full of the glorious bad-taste colourful décor and fashions of the time. If you're not a full-on fan of this type of film you may have some problems with it though. The script is full of ridiculous dialogue which can be good for a cheap laugh – Antonio Sabato, in particular, delivers some hilariously silly lines in an earnest and deadpan manner. And while the mystery is generally compelling, the resolution – both the climatic confrontation and killer's motivations – isn't brilliant. Not that gialli are exactly famed for their great plotting and convincing explanations for their homicidal maniacs but the casual viewer may have issues with these weaknesses. However, fans of this kind of movie really can't go wrong here. This is a straight-ahead giallo that delivers the thrills and spills expected. Umberto Lenzi doesn't display the craft of an Argento, Bava or Fulci; however, there is something appealing about his slightly sleazy no-nonsense approach.

Les Ripoux!

Tampopo!

A Taxing Woman!

Diva!

Le Cadeau!

So so many....

Mao's Last Dancer - an Australian movie based on Li Cunxin's autobiography..


At the age of 11, Li Cunxin was plucked from a poor Chinese village by Madame Mao's cultural delegates and taken to Beijing to study ballet. In 1979, during a cultural exchange to Texas, he fell in love with an American woman. Two years later, Li managed to defect and went on to perform as a principal dancer for the Houston Ballet and as a principal artist with the Australian Ballet.

English subtitles

This is one of my all time favorite foreign language films:

The Spirit Of The Beehive '73 (Spain)

(From IMdB):
In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Ana, a sensitive seven-year-old girl in a rural Spanish hamlet is traumatized after a traveling projectionist screens a print of James Whale's 1931 "Frankenstein" for the village. The youngster is profoundly disturbed by the scenes in which the monster murders the little girl and is later killed himself by the villagers. She questions her sister about the profundities of life and death and believes her older sibling when she tells her that the monster is not dead, but exists as a spirit inhabiting a nearby barn. When a Loyalist soldier, a fugitive from Franco's victorious army, hides out in the barn, Ana crosses from reality into a fantasy world of her own.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv3ZClcPpEM

I see you haven't read my first post.

This one is nice.

Az én XX. századom '89 aka My 20th Century (Hungary)

(From IMdB) Separated identical twins ride an Orient Express unaware of each other: a feminist anarchist and a hedonistic courtesan, living under the powder-keg Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Separate families adopted the impoverished orphans. At the dawn of the 20th Century the double-blind experiment hits crescendo for Dora & Lili, born the evening Edison unveiled his incandescent bulb. In 1900, technology was accelerating, could women's rights and national self-determination keep pace?

I actually watched Les Ripoux when I was trying to learn French.

Are you saying Porky's isn't a foreign classic?

Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh (1971)



Martino and Hilton strike again in the same year, this time with the comely Anita Strindberg in tow and audio sensualist Bruno Nicolai supplying the soundscape. It is occasionally weighted down by some lengthy dialogue, but it remains a highly stylized and grisly feast for the eyes nonetheless. Strong set pieces, superb camera work and a pretzel of a plot that keeps you guessing till (almost) the end give this enjoyable Giallo some surprising sting.

No comment!

Delicatessen

Post-apocalyptic surrealist black comedy about the landlord of an apartment building who occasional prepares a delicacy for his odd tenants.

Savage Planet, French Animation

Yeu Woo Bie (Yobi the Five Tailed Fox) Korean Animation

Anything Akira Kurisawa (Japanese director, Yojimbo, Seven Samurai, Ran, etc..)

Allegro Non Troppo, Italian Animation, Italy's Fantasia

Dragon Ball the movie, Thailand actually made this campy live action film. It tried hard to preserve the flavor of DBZ on a very very prohibitively small budget.

Nu Pogidy, Russian cartoon much in the vein of Tom and Jerry except they have a Wolf (Volk) and a Rabbit.

The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey '88 (New Zealand)

(From IMdB): A young boy in 14th century Cumbria (north of England) keeps getting visions he cannot explain. His village has so far been spared from the black death, but the villagers fear its imminent arrival. With the boy as their guide, a group set out to dig a hole to the other side of the world, so as to fulfill the visions and save the village. At the 'other side' is 20th century New Zealand !

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8wh3y?hmz=707265766e657874