If you took a random poll asking people to name the most mysterious place on Earth the answers you’d receive would be fairly widespread. Some would say The North Pole, others Madagascar, and Robert Fure would reply with a woman’s g-spot. But surely someone, somewhere would answer correctly. And that correct answer lay beneath the surface of the Earth’s oceans. Hollywood is well aware of this fact and has explored and exploited our fear of the unknown in films both great and small, from The Abyss to Sphere, with stops at all levels of quality in between. Two such movies released in 1989, Deepstar Six and Leviathan, bypassed subtlety and any real sense of mystery in favor of creature feature thrills, chills and at least a modicum of fun. Both are worth watching on late night cable, but Leviathan is the better of the two thanks in large part to the presence of Peter Weller. And now twenty two years later South Korea has jumped into the bloody pool with Sector 7, but unlike the films above its efforts to (intentionally) entertain come up dry.

A man and a woman sit before a judge discussing the dissolution of their marriage. Simin wants to move out of the country with her husband and daughter in tow, but Nader refuses as he needs to stay and care for his ill and elderly father. She can go, he says, but she cannot take their daughter. The judge agrees, and the two are dismissed back to the turmoil of their private lives. This simple setup could be the start of any number of familiar dramas in most countries around the globe, but Simin and Nader are a modern day Iranian couple which puts an unusual and rarely seen spin on the story that follows. What starts as a straight forward tale of one couple’s split becomes an exploration into the many divisions in their life. The separation between them is simply the first step into the gap between parent and child, male and female, right and wrong, and truth and fiction. A Separation is a mesmerizing journey into the everyday, but it’s an everyday that has remained foreign to much of the Western world.

The doors of Norway’s Bastoy Residential School remained open from 1900 to 1953, and in that half century hundreds of wayward boys called it home. They found themselves there for crimes big and small, but the goal was the same for all of them. Find the “honorable, humble, useful, Christian boy” inside the criminal, and then return them to society. But while this small chunk of rock adrift just south of Oslo was a home it was never meant to feel like one. A biting cold pervaded the place, inside and out, and it was as prevalent as the rigid discipline, hard labor and overall oppressiveness that was the school’s daily routine. And as inescapable as the island itself. King of Devil’s Island is based on the true story of a student uprising that occurred at Bastoy in 1915. An incident triggered by sexual abuse but fueled by pent-up rage led to the boys overthrowing their guardians and rioting until a unit of the Norwegian army arrived to quell the situation. The film is an affecting drama that mostly overcomes a familiar story with strong acting by Stellan Skarsgard and others, atmospheric cinematography and a core message of integrity and solidarity.

The title of this post is pretty self explanatory, so no introduction is really needed here. But… I do feel compelled to point out the same thing I point out every year. Nailing foreign releases down to a particular year isn’t an exact science. Obviously every film has an actual date of initial release, but most foreign titles don’t hit our shores until the following year, if at all. I try to go by original release date whenever possible though which means some of my choices have yet to be screened in the US outside of film festivals and import DVDs. That said, here’s a list of my eleven favorite foreign films for 2011 in alphabetical order. (Be sure to check out my lists from 2010, 2009 and 2008 too.) And because I know someone will ask, yes, I did see Certified Copy.

The global recession we currently find ourselves in has many causes, but one of the more obvious ones has to do with the machinations and maneuverings of the men and women who work in the financial market. Movies like the recent Margin Call and Wall Street sequel used this environment for fast paced financial drama (with varying success), but that’s not the only genre the crisis can intrude upon. Perhaps there’s a bit of romance and a few laughs to be found amidst the greed, depression, and suffering too. That was apparently the hope anyway with the new French film, My Piece of the Pie, but the end results are anything but humorous or romantic. They’re not even all that dramatic. Hell, the ending isn’t even an ending.

Sion Sono’s films have never really been aimed at a wide audience, but few directors are as capable as he is of making the ugliest things beautiful. Case in point is his latest film, Guilty of Romance. Izumi is the docile wife of a successful romance novelist who saves all of his energy and emotion for his books and readers. Her entire life is in service to him as her daily duties include making sure his shoes are ready for him at the door and his meals are ready for him at dinnertime. She’s also expected to compliment his naked body even though he’s never interested in sharing it with her in any meaningful way. Seriously, the scene where he shows her his penis, fishing for reassuring words, and then tells her she can touch it if she wants is just awkward and painful to watch. But when she steps out of her normal life to get a job and find her own worth she discovers a deviance she never expected… both outside her home and inside herself. She meets Mitsuko, a professor by day who moonlights as a prostitute, and the two of them descend into a very dark hole together. And that’s not a euphemism. Okay, maybe it is.

In honor of The Muppets and our ongoing Muppet coverage this week’s Foreign Objects is sticking with the puppet theme in our own special way. But the Muppets are an American sensation, so while they’ve traveled the world they’ve always done so in American movies. Non-Muppet puppet movies are few and far between, and most of them are still US productions (Team America: World Police, Puppet Master, Let My Puppets Come) with only a handful of foreign titles like Legend of the Sacred Stone and Kooky. But I couldn’t find either of those. So we’ll be taking a look at Peter Jackson’s 1989 release from New Zealand, Meet the Feebles. It’s like The Muppets, but with more sex, drugs, murder and sticky white fluids…

Chhaya and Arvind are living a borderline middle-class life in modern day India, but circumstances are sliding them lower. Arvind (Alekh Sangal) can’t catch a break at his job managing a construction crew where he’s consistently pressured by his boss to speed things up and do more with less. Sitting across from the balding man with the crude 9/11 sculpture on his desk Arvind is forced to swallow his pride and accept the mistreatment if he wants to hang on to his job. Chhaya (Rasika Dugal) meanwhile spends her days at home doing chores, shopping for groceries, and falling quickly and quietly into depression. At least until an accident of questionable intervention leads her to find a sculpture of Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, that “even God couldn’t make more beautiful.” The statue sits in a young boy’s shop where he claims to be the sculptor and sets a very high price for it, but the financial cost doesn’t phase her. She becomes convinced that her and her husband need the sculpture to make everything better, to make everything right, and to give her another chance at having children. Her desire becomes an obsession, and soon the better life they were hoping for begins slipping through their fingers faster than they could have imagined. The result is an engaging and beautifully rendered drama about the dangers of compulsion and the lengths we’ll go to be happy.

China in the early twentieth century is a land of strife, starvation and feuding warlords. Hao Jie (Andy Lau) is one of the strongest and most ruthless among them, even going so far as to kill an enemy within the walls of the sacred Shaolin temple. Together with his right-hand man, Tsao Man (Nicholas Tse), he murders and maims his way across the country with impunity. But his greed reaches its limit when bloodthirsty ambition combined with an act of betrayal destroys his family and leaves him for dead. Wounded and emotionally devastated, Hao takes refuge with the only people that will have him… the Shaolin monks. He can’t hide from his past forever though, and soon the new man he claims to be is forced to face the world of bloodshed he once called his own. Joining Hao in the fight are the honorable, ass-kicking monks and a wise-cracking cook (Jackie Chan), but will they be enough to defeat the new warlord hellbent on their destruction?

It shouldn’t have to be this way, but the summer movie-going season is generally known far more for big, bombastic spectacles than for smart, affecting character-based films. That’s not a knock on blockbusters as there were actually quite a few good ones in theaters the past few months, but it’s more an unfortunate commentary on how the smaller films are often lost in the shuffle of May to July if they’re even released at all. But August is the month where explosions and CGI slowly give way to dialogue and character, and it’s here where an intimate look at life, death, and defying expectations just might find the audience it deserves. Paloma (Garance Le Guillermic) has had enough. She’s only eleven years old, but she’s already had her fill of life’s absurdities thanks to a family that annoys far more than they enrich. Her mother (Anne Brochet) is happily celebrating ten years of therapy (and the subsequent stream of anti-depressants), her father (Wladimir Yordanoff) moves seamlessly between being flustered and disinterested, and her older sister (Sarah Lepicard) is doing her best to make her little sister’s life miserable. The building’s concierge/janitor, Renée Michel (Josiane Balasko), is a frumpy-looking woman who has very little patience for the bullshit emanating from her wealthy tenants. She’s a tool to them and nothing more, and while they most likely wouldn’t be able to pick her out of a lineup she’s actually harboring a rich interior life that she shares with no one. She finds [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Sawako (Hikari Mitsushima) isn’t quite leading the life she always wanted in Tokyo. She’s been there for five years and like clockwork is on both her fifth job and fifth boyfriend… neither of which she’s all that thrilled about. The job sees her walked over by her male bosses and abused by little kids, and her private life finds her playing second fiddle to her boyfriend’s daughter, Kayoko (Kira Aihara). Her co-workers tell her to leave Kenichi (Masashi Endo), but she thinks she doesn’t really deserve any better. “We’re both lower-middles,” she says. How can she possibly hope for more? Clearly, Sayako is no bundle of sunshine. She gets a call from home letting her know that her father is gravely ill and she’s needed to help with the family business, a freshwater clam packing company. Her impulse is to say no as she left home for a reason, but she reluctantly lets Kenichi talk her into returning home with both him and his rude daughter in tow. Once there she goes to work trying to keep the factory afloat in her father’s absence, but it won’t be easy. If her door-mat attitude wasn’t bad enough she’s also forced to confront townspeople she offended, deal with her boyfriend’s wandering eye, and accept the guilt of her last words to her father those many years ago.

What do you call a zombie movie without zombies? The smart-asses among you will say 28 Days Later, but that at least had killer humans acting like zombies… no, I’m referring more to the idea and atmosphere of a zombie movie but without the actual brain-munching undead. What you’d have is the new, blackly comic, Argentinian thriller, Phase 7. Coco (Daniel Hendler) and his very pregnant wife Pipi (Jazmín Stuart) are shopping and bickering with love when the other customers around them start panicking and rushing the store. It’s a peripheral panic though as the couple barely notices the frenetic nature of their fellow city dwellers. At least not until they return home and see news that a global virus has spread to epidemic level and has finally reached their home of Buenos Aires. A quick trip down to the lobby late at night sees a neighbor being wheeled out and a plastic barrier going up… the building has been quarantined and the residents are trapped within.

Remember the MPAA’s much ballyhooed new rating for adult themed/non-porn films back in 1990? NC-17 stood for ‘No children under 17″ and was meant for films too aggressively naughty or thematically mature for kids and teens to even glimpse. One of the earliest films to receive the rating was Belgium’s caustic and satiric faux-documentary, Man Bites Dog (1992). It features a camera crew following a serial killer day to day as he does what he does best… kill, rape, and disembowel innocent people. It’s a brilliant film that manages to subvert both documentaries and serial killer films in one bloody swathe. Vampires is not rated NC-17, but then again pretty much nothing is these days. (A Serbian Film most likely won’t play in a theater with that rating, and Blue Valentine successfully appealed down to an R.) But it bears a few other similarities with with the film starting with its country of origin, Belgium. It’s also done in the style of a documentary, but the serial killer is traded in for a family of vampires who introduce the filmmakers to their modern-day bloodsucking ways. It doesn’t have the same bite as that earlier film, but it’s violent, darkly comic, and damn good.

This week’s film comes from director Ole Bornedal (Nightwatch, Nightwatch), and it shows us that white people are violent and racist bastards no matter the language. An educated man named Johannes moves his family back to his small hometown and finds trouble when a local immigrant is targeted by townspeople out for revenge. The dark-skinned, Bosnian refugee is falsely accused of killing a kindly old woman, and when the angry, Danish citizens come looking for justice Johannes puts the lives of his family and himself at risk by taking the man into his home for protection. Bornedal’s film is part thriller and part social commentary as it explores the motivations of people both good and bad. And the razor thin line between the two…

There are few genre character-types as tired and overdone as the vampire. They’re rarely scary, usually uninteresting, and often terribly predictable. They’ve become so mundane and commonplace that any attempt to shake up the norm automatically raises a film’s value and may help offset other issues. 30 Days Of Night for example trades the sexy, vampiric allure for some truly effective and horrific monsters. Daybreakers adds a unique, sci-fi twist that made vamps the normal citizens and humans the ones hiding in the dark. Let the Right One In is a coming of age tale that happens to feature a vampire. We Are the Night isn’t quite up to the standards of that Swedish chiller, but it’s definitely as good or better than the other two. The film opens on a passenger jet high in the night sky as the camera tracks from the blood-soaked cockpit back through an equally messy passenger cabin before coming to rest on three well-dressed, smiling women. Engorged on their energy drink of choice they knock out the fuselage door and leap from the plane… They cross paths with a street thief named Lena (Karoline Herfurth) and take her under their wing when the trio’s de facto leader, Louise (Nina Hoss), falls for her hard and bites her even harder. Lena’s indoctrination into the family brings her on a wild ride through a world of wealthy excess, emotional conflict, and the thirst for human blood, but with Berlin’s finest hot on their trail can these [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

A staple of comic book superhero movies is the origin story, and even though Hollywood is convinced audiences like seeing the same damn ones over and over (cough Spider Man Superman cough) it’s always refreshing to see new and original creations onscreen. One of the best (and most under-appreciated) is M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. The film is a methodically paced exploration of both the hero and villain roles and features some powerful yet quiet scenes of the two men coming to terms with who and what they are. (The scene with Bruce Willis at the breakfast table silently acknowledging to his son his new found heroic nature remains one of Shyamalan’s greatest achievements.) Now imagine that same kind of fresh and creative take on the subject but infused with brutality, hope, and some stellar action and suspense scenes… A little boy with a prosthetic leg and a bandage over his eyes stumbles through the rain. He falls and tries to remove the fabric, but his mom abruptly grabs his hand and tells him he has to wear it at all times. The boy’s father arrives and begins to berate them both, taunting them that “Wrapping him up won’t make him human.” And then he begins to physically beat the woman. The boy’s tiny hands begin to clench and shake, he lifts one up to his face, and he removes the blindfold. The man stands, exits the house, and walks backwards through the rain until he’s in the middle of the [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives proved to be a divisive film in its commercial release following its surprise Palme d’Or win at last year’s Cannes. On the one hand, the strange film’s recognition exhibited a triumphant glimmer of hope for international art cinema in a world economy that hasn’t exactly been making room for ‘difficult’ art. On the other, for many the film has itself proved to be an alienating experience and was written off as a pretentious exercise that exemplifies the worst tendencies of art cinema.

Gimmick movies come in all shapes and sizes, and one of the newest types is the single-take feature. This used to be impossible due to camera and film limitations, but digital video has opened a whole new world to filmmakers looking to challenge themselves and reward audiences. Single-take films are exactly that, films shot entirely in one, continuous, uninterrupted take, and some recent examples include Russian Ark and PVC-1. (The British horror film Cut uses a single-take for all but its first five minutes.) The latest film to earn as much attention for the technique as it does for the art is the Uruguayan horror movie The Silent House. It’s about a father and his teen daughter tasked with spending the night in a rural house that they’re cleaning up and repairing for rental. They settle in for the night, but when she hears noises upstairs he heads up to investigate, screams, and then falls silent. She goes in search of her father and soon discovers there are worse things than being an orphan…

The personalities of runners always seem to run the gamut. On the one hand, regular exercise and fitness is a sign of stability, a display of having chosen the “right” priorities to care for one’s own body. On the other hand, running can become an obsession and a compulsion for a variety of reasons, and can become the vice of somebody with the personality of an addict. The strange relationship between compulsive personalities and physical fitness is at the heart of Benjamin Heisenberg’s Austrian thriller The Robber, an engrossing and complex yet economically straightforward character-driven thriller about a marathon runner who has an addiction to robbing banks. We first meet Johann Rettenberger (Andreus Lust) jogging in a tight square around a small yard, and quickly realize that he’s in prison. As soon as he’s called back inside and is directed to his cell, he continues running on the small treadmill right next to his bed. It’s one of those simple openings that says so much through doing so little, and this characterizes much of The Robber, a film with a deceiving simplicity that makes it all the more compelling.

Watch enough foreign language movies and you’re bound to develop some (usually incorrect) perception of that particular country’s citizens. Korean people are more likely to kick you than they are to smile. French folks will cheat on each other at the drop of a pastry. There are no schools for acting in Thailand. You get the idea. Japanese films are no different and in fact offer up more than one assumption about the culture. And no, they don’t all have to do with lactation or the enticing aroma of girls’ underwear. Some are about the overwhelming fear that Japanese society appears to have towards its own children. The youth of the nation are alternately dangerous to others (Battle Royale) or to themselves (Suicide Club), but the one constant is the complete lack of connection or understanding the adults have for their teenage counterparts. It’s an intriguing idea and one writer/director Tetsuya Nakashima (Kamikaze Girls) has decided to embrace with his latest movie, Confessions. His film is far more subtle than those mentioned above, but no less dangerous or dark, and he melds it seamlessly with another popular theme in Asian cinema…