The platform, aka El Hoyo
It is about a futuristic prison, where food is distributed to inmates in a vertical prison. They have elected to be there, on promise of reward on release. They are fed on a vertical table, the descends, level by level.
IMO, it is really about humanity and the choice between self service and a greater good.
It is a great movie. The sequel… Eh.
Seven Samurai, and The Hidden Fortress.
Idk about favourite (too many choices) but I watched Salaam Bombay! Last night and it was amazing.
Life is Beautiful is one of my favorites that should really only be watched with subtitles. It’s a really sad movie, but sticks with you in a good way.
Tampopo is up there for sure…
Memories of Murder is probably my favorite Korean language film.
Tokyo Story is amazing. Ozu doesn’t get as much credit as Kurosawa, but pop over to his rotten tomatoes page and look at how many films he made, and what the ratings of them are.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a filmography that stacked. Dude made like 50 films, and the lowest rating is like 80-something
I really liked “Battle Royal” i feel like the hunger games may have been written taking HEAVY influence from this film.
Rififi
Parasite
Seven Samurai
Manon Of The Spring
Babette’s Feast
Train to Busan
Das Boot might be my favourite movie full stop.
Kung Fu Hustle
Excellent film, and shaolin soccer is brilliant too from the same guy. Steven chow.
Came here to mention this one, and here it is! I love Shaolin Soccer.
Right on. At least half of Stephen Chow’s catalog came to mind when I read this question.
The Raid: Redemption.
My Neighbor Totoro
All of the Ghibli movies are great, though they’re some of the only foreign films I will watch dubbed, because the voice casts they get are insane. The English dub of Totoro with the Fanning sisters while they were still children is just fantastic.
The sketchy site I used only had the Japanese version unfortunately.
Such a perfect heartwarming movie.
Pan’s Labyrinth for me
I love it because it’s one of the few dark fantasy movies natively made in Spanish. The dead fascists are a bonus.
One of my favorite details that is easy to miss if you aren’t a native speaker is that Pan speaks in medieval Spanish. It honestly almost sounds like French
I can’t find anything to really support the note about the faun speaking an early version of Spanish; do you have a link I could read/watch?
I’ve found people noting that Doug Jones is dubbed by the Spanish voice actor into Castilian (rather than any Central or South American dialect) and that his language is formal and somewhat archaic.
Quick correction, Castilian and Spanish are he same thing. It’s not an old dialect or an old language. Spain has lots of languages, and the renaming of Castilian to Spanish was a “recent” (last 100 years) attempt from a dictator to delegitimize all of the other languages (also prohibiting them from being taught in schools or being used officially).
Also I strongly dislike the use of dialects here, although there are many different accents the language remains the same. If we start to call Mexican or Argentinians Spanish into dialects we might as well call Texan or Californian English as dialects as well, since they’re equally different.
Also, also, Mexico (the largest Spanish speaking country by population is in North America), not sure why you only mentioned South and Central.
That being said, yes, the Faun speaks very formally. It’s not necessarily archaic, but the sort of language one might expect in a court room. But yeah, that used to be the colloquial Spanish a while back.
Thanks. I really wrote “Castilian” to mean that sources on the web suggest his dialogue is at least somewhat modern Spanish Spanish (so to speak) – but I’m ignorant of the differences between Spanish spoken in the Americas, including North America as you rightly point out, and the Iberian peninsula. I didn’t mean to suggest that Castilian was archaic.
Looked into it a bit more. It seems it’s not exactly medieval Spanish but just old and really formal Spanish, akin to Shakespearean. Nevertheless, not something you’d hear nowadays. Everyone else just speaks with a Spaniard accent, there’s no Latin American dialects in the movie.
I remember looking up the script a little while ago. Here’s an excerpt
You will see a luxurious banquet. Don’t eat or drink any of it while you’re there
(Fwiw, I’m from Latin America so Spaniard accents all just sound weirdly posh to me, like that video of a British kid complaining about the ice cream man)
Thank you, that’s interesting to know!
There are so many foreign language films I love. Several have already been mentioned here, but I’ll add a few that haven’t been:
- Rashomon - Kurosawa, 1950
- Umberto D. - de Sica, 1952
- Amarcord - Fellini, 1973
- Many films by the Dardenne brothers, in particular: The Promise (1996) and The Son (2002).
- Many films by Kore-eda - perhaps his most well-known one being Shoplifters (2018).
I mean it’s gotta be Parasite (the Korean Movie)
I hated that movie, so predictable I had to stop watching.
I would enter “memories of murder”. It goes toe to toe with Rear Window as one of the best suspense movies ever made, and MOM would go on my top 50 in any language any genre.
I was just going to say Memories of Murder. It’s my favorite Bong Joon Ho film, and possibly my favorite Korean language film (that I’ve seen).
It’s so fucking good. The fight scenes have to be some of the most realistic looking I’ve seen. At times it looks like they’re really throwing each other around. There’s one scene where the main cop guy comes flying in from off screen and full on drop kicks a dude, and he commits completely. Made me lol the first time I saw it, I had to rewind and watch it again.
