Non-English movies

Here are a few:

My Life as Dog
The Nights of Cabiria
Swept Away
The Bicycle Thief

Monsoon Wedding
Cousin, Cousine (the earlier French version. The English remake was a dud!)
Chocolat
Rashomon
Wild Strawberries

Central do Brasil (Central Station).
La Vita e Bella

Can't Go Wrong Here. Here's a list of foreign films that won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture:

http://www.siliconvalleycleaners.com/lifestyles/movies/oscar_best_foreign.html

Off the top of my head:

Life is Beautiful
Tobia Al Cafe
The Girl from Paris

"Raise the Red Lattern"

Foreign Film
"Indochine"
(Catherine DeNeuve is main character)

"Jibeuro" ("The Way Home") Korean
"Cidade de Deus" ("City of God") Brazilian
"Yi ge dou bu neng shao" ("Not One Less") Chinese (same director as previously mentioned "Raise the Red Lantern")

First and last mentioned are very sentimental and uplifting. "City of God" is very depressing, depicting the dead end violent life of "street kids" in the slums of Rio.

The Apu Trilogy, all excellent (The name of the Indian director escapes me, much to my chagrin. I'm sure someone here can fill in the blank...)

http://us.imdb.com/Name?Ray,+Satyajit

Here is a wide variety:

Diva. A funny french film about the stolen bootleg performance of an opera star and the chase that ensues.
Wages of Fear. A really long existential film from the 50's about ex patriots hauling explosives through the Amazon. Was remade in the 70's as The Sorcerer starring Roy Scheider.
Wings of Desire. Great German film about an angel who so loves humanity that he gives up his wings and immortality to spend one lifetime on earth.
Delicatessen. The same guy who made Amelie made this funny and disturbing film about a canibalistic apartment tenement.

There are tremendous number of good European films.

Here, for an undepicted reason I pick up a film, i.e.,

Gattopardo,Il (aka Leopard,The) by L.Visconti.

American filmmakers weren't the only ones who brought World War II to cinema in some great films:

"Das Boot" (The Boat) -- the antithesis of submarine pictures.

"The Gardens of the Finzi Continis" -- about the Italian Jews during
Mussolini - poignant and with a profoundly sad ending.

"Night of the Shooting Stars" -- a small Italian village being liberated during World War II -- sereal and moving with book ends of an enigmatic view out a window into a night sky.

"Europa, Europa" -- again WWII about a Jewish boys who succeeds in portraying himself as a German, concealing his Jewishness.

Along the Wizard theme of WWII :

Cry, the Children ( I think that's the name, it's Louie Malle film )

Another excellent Louis Malle WWII film is "Lacombe, Lucien". It is the story of an amoral teenager (If memory serves me, the opening scene shows Lucien killing a songbird with his slingshot and showing no emotion). He helps the Nazis in minor ways but has no real feelings about them pro or con. In the end he becomes "heroic" to protect the father of his "property", a young Jewish girl.

Some Russian movies:
The Potyomkin Battleship[/b] by Sergey Eisenstein,
Il Barbero de Siberia[/i] and Exhausted by Sun[/i]
by Nikita Mikhalkov,
the documentary by Michael Romm The Ordinary Fascism[/b].

King of Hearts
Ran

(my others have already been said! :-D)

Another good one: L'homme du Train

The Garden Of the Finzi Continis
The Garden of the Finzi Continis!, already mentioned.

I saw that movie when it first came out, 30? years ago. To this day it is a movie that haunts me. Interesting, I saw it as a young girl and a year or two ago. Usually, one's perspective changes with age. It hit me just as hard, just as sweet, just as sad, just as lovely.

As a young woman, I did learn from it. Since then, I witnessed/learned about the inhumanity of mankind to one another. That might be the only difference in the viewing.

A+++++ movie.

fatima10