Foreign Films

An old maid turned millionaire’s wife realizes that she’s going to be denied her husband’s inheritance and decides to do something about it in Elena, the 2011 winner of Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize. Described as a Hitchcockian thriller but in reality a somber drama without a third act, Elena has a lot of good things going for it until it doesn’t, begging the question: what’s the point?

Read FilmJabber’s full Elena movie review.

From Nacho Vigalondo, the director of Timecrimes, comes Extraterrestrial, a comedic thriller that looks at the evolution of four people’s behaviors after they learn that a giant spaceship has arrived over Madrid and that much of the population has fled, or disappeared. Unlike Timecrimes, unfortunately, Extraterrestrial doesn’t leave much of an impression.

Read FilmJabber’s full Extraterrestrial movie review.

To put it simply, Polisse is by far one of the best films of the year, and of the last several years.  As another critic accurately put it, Polisse is like a season of The Wire packed into one film.  As The Wire is one of my all-time favorite shows, this film proved to be endlessly fascinating and affecting. 

Read the full Polisse movie review.

Headhunters is a pulse-pounding nonstop action thrill ride with plenty of intrigue thrown in.  The middle 45 minutes of this film is by far the most fun I’ve had at the movies all year.

Read FilmJabber’s full Headhunters movie review.

A chambermaid meets an ex-cop at a speed dating event and things take off from there, and then are momentarily taken hostage by a group of gun-wielding burglars in the low-key psychological thriller The Double Hour, from filmmaker Giuseppe Capotondi.

Read FilmJabber’s full The Double Hour movie review.

The Raid: Redemption releases in select theaters today!

As a rookie member of an elite special-forces team, Rama (Iko Uwais) is instructed to hang back during a covert mission involving the extraction of a brutal crime lord from a rundown fifteen-story apartment block.  But when a spotter blows their cover, boss Tama (Ray Sahetaphy) offers lifelong sanctuary to every killer, rapist and thief in the building in exchange fortheir heads. Now Rama must stand in for the team’s fallen leader (Joe Taslim) and use every iota of his fighting strength – winding through every floor and every room to complete the mission and escape with his life.

Win an autographed movie poster signed by writer/director Gareth Evans! Enter today!

The Kid with a Bike marks the third Dardenne brothers film I’ve had the pleasure of seeing after Lorna’s Silence and the incredible L’enfant.  While not as emotionally hard hitting as that film, The Kid with a Bike is a simple tale filled with a very complex moral landscape. 

Read FilmJabber’s full The Kid with a Bike movie review.

Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture, In Darkness is a dramatization of a real-life story from World War II, about a Polish man who reluctantly helps a group of Jews live in the sewers of Lvov for over a year. The story is pretty remarkable and the movie is quite good, but In Darkness lacks the emotion found in cinema’s greatest depictions of the Holocaust.

Read FilmJabber’s full In Darkness movie review.

Foreign films are cool. Because they’re foreign, and they speak foreign languages, and they have plots you’d never see in America, like Bullhead, about a steroid-fueled cattle farmer named Jacky Vanmarsenille who gets involved with a criminal meat trader (those exist?) and is forced to face his tragic childhood as federal agents begin to investigate an assassination of one of their colleagues… Who comes up with this stuff?

Read FilmJabber’s full Bullhead movie review.

Miss Bala, the official Mexican entry to the Oscars for 2011, is a dark and terrifying look into the world of Mexico’s gang wars.  The story follows Laura, a young woman who is striving for a place in the Miss Baja California beauty pageant.  After an evening at a shady night club turns deadly when a heavily armed gang attacks, Laura unwillingly becomes a pawn for the criminal group in order to try to locate her best friend, who was separated in the mayhem.

Read our full Miss Bala movie review.

Pregnant wife, check. Upcoming promotion, check. Corrupt, murderous cops who’ve kidnapped said wife and future mother? Check. The French thriller À bout portant (Point Blank) is a fast-paced thriller that races from one action sequence to the next but fails to capitalize on its twists and turns.

Read FilmJabber’s full Point Blank movie review.

An Iranian-based film hardly seems the setting for a sexy romantic drama about two teenage girls who fall in love with one another, but Circumstance relishes its taboo topic, the very camerawork oozing with sensuality. Circumstance is a beautiful and alluring film, one that works on many levels, painting a picture of repression while also focusing on a non-traditional love triangle.

Read FilmJabber’s full Circumstance movie review.