SchrodingerC
Member
Maybe not essential, but a good movie nonetheless.
City of God (Cidade de Deus)
That's a very broad range offcourse. What are you interested in genrewise?
Pretty recent stuff like Amour, Das Weisse Band, un prophete, incendies, toni erdman, The handmaiden, The Broken Circle Breakdown, Son of Saul, Bullshead, ... are pretty good starting places.
YESSome of my personal favorite non-English directors:
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Elite squad 1 & 2
YES
El Topo and Holy Mountain+++++
Fellini's Satyricon is a really interesting and strange movie. Essentially a man's journey through Rome during the first century AD. It's more of a series of vignettes so you get a nice variety of unique themes and situations.
Akira Kurosawa's entire catalog.
Oldboy and A Bittersweet Life. They are both fantastic South-Korean revenge movies.
Chungking Express
Just watched The Handmaiden last night and it might be one of my favorite foreign films ever, just fantastic.
Kind of want to get the Bluray now that I think of it. I was amazed at a VHS of it I saw 20 years ago and I bet it would look really nice remastered. I most remember that massive red light district in the beginning. That place was pretty far-out and a spectacle that kept with me.I really enjoyed this one, used to be on Netflix, might still be. The photography is gorgeous, many scenes capture that sort of light seen in Rembrandt paintings. The architecture of the sets is somewhat Cubist, gives off a pretty unique atmosphere amidst the backdrop of ancient Rome.
Lot's of great suggestions in here. I would like to also add Trollhunter from Norway. May look like a b-rated horror flick, but it's actually really good.
I'm Italian so I'll focus on that.
Off the top of my head:
- La Strada
- Le notti di Cabiria (the bitter sweet story of a happy-go-lucky prostitute, and how reality repeatedly crushes her)
- 8 1/2
- Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (a high ranking police officer commits a violent crime, and explores just how much he can get away with due to his rank)
- La Grande Guerra
- C'eravamo tanto amati
- L'armata Brancaleone (a decade before Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the original medieval comedy masterpiece)
- Suspiria
- Ladri di Biciclette
- Lo Chiamavano Jeeg Robot (a pulp superhero movie set in modern day Rome, with a villain that puts Marvel's bad guys to shame)
As a bonus, a Japanese movie I watched recently and absolutely adored: Woman in the Dunes
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
The Double Life of Veronique
Playtime
A Separation is in my opinion the best film of the last 10 years.