Share

Tweet

From our Criticker Movie Blog.

One of the most overlooked Oscar categories every year is Foreign Language Film. From our perspective, lumping every non-English film together for one award is a questionable practice, but it’s better than nothing — which is what they could expect in the ‘major’ categories.

Winners from this category are often, unsuprisingly, worlds better than their Best Picture counterparts. Last year’s blistering Tsotsi, for example, stacks up just fine against the moralizing Crash.

Let’s take a look at the last ten winners:

Franta Louka is a concert cellist in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, a confirmed bachelor and a lady’s man. Having lost his place in the state orchestra, he must make ends meet by playing at funerals and painting tombstones. But he has run up a large debt, and when his friend, the grave-digger Mr. Broz, suggests a scheme for making a lot of money by marrying a Russian woman so that she can get her Czech papers, he reluctantly agrees. She takes advantage of the situation to emigrate to West Germany, to her lover; and leaves her five-year-old son with his grandmother; when the grandmother dies, Kolya must come and live with his stepfather – Louka.
[via: IMDB]

Rank it on Criticker / Buy it at Amazon

J.W. Katadreuffe is the son of Joba Katadreuffe and A.B. Drevenhaven. Though fully neglected by Joba, Dreverhaven ensures the succesful career of his son. Mostly unseen, though he sues his son a few times. The son Katadreuffe succeeds, but at great costs.
[via: IMDB]

Rank it on Criticker / Buy at Amazon

From one of the world’s most acclaimed comic filmmakers comes an unexpected and unforgettable fable about the power of laughter to move the human heart and the power of the imagination to bolster the human spirit.

Rank it on Criticker / Buy it at Amazon

This is the story of a mother (Roth) recovering from the death of her teenage son. She travels to Barcelona to find her son’s father and revisits many places of her youth.
[via: Metacritic]

Rank it on Criticker / Buy it at Amazon

In 19th century China, a magical sword given by a warrior (Chow) to his lover (Yeoh) is stolen and the quest to find it ensues. The search leads to the House of Yu where the story travels into a different direction with the introduction of a mysterious assassin and another love story.
[via: Metacritic]

Rank it on Criticker / Buy it at Amazon

Ciki and Nino, a Bosnian and a Serb, are soldiers stranded in No Man’s Land — a trench between enemy lines during the Bosnian war. They have no one to trust, no way to escape without getting shot, and a fellow soldier is lying on the trench floor with a spring-loaded bomb set to explode beneath him if he moves. The absurdity of their situation would be comical if it didn’t have such dire consequences.

Rank it on Criticker / Buy it at Amazon

A love story spanning two continents, Nowhere in Africa is the extraordinary true tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya.

Rank it on Criticker / Buy it at Amazon

Director Denys Arcand revisits the situations and relationships that informed his international breakthrough "The Decline of the American Empire." Set 17 years after Decline, this film, like its predecessor, examines the varying politics — economic, personal and sexual — at play among a group of friends, lovers and ex-spouses.

Rank it on Criticker / Buy it at Amazon

Based on the profoundly moving true story that captured the world’s attention, The Sea Inside is about Spaniard Ramon Sampedro (Bardem), who fought a 30-year campaign to win the right to end his life with dignity. The film is the story of Ramon’s relationships with two women: Julia (Rueda), a lawyer who supports his cause, and Rosa (Duenas), a local woman who wants to convince him that life is worth living.

Rank it on Criticker / Buy it at Amazon

Set amidst the bustling townships of Johannesburg and infused with the pumping high-energy Kwaito music of the top South African artist Zola, Tsotsi is an extraordinary portrait of the choies we make in life and the personal triumph that comes from choosing love over rage.

Rank it on Criticker / Buy it at Amazon

Tags: Movies, Oscar, Oscars, Awards, Foreign Film, Winner, 10 years