75 Best Foreign Movies on Criterion Channel Right Now

Even if you aren’t familiar with Akira Kurosawa classics like Rashomon and Seven Samurai, Madadayo works as a portrait of a great man who seemed to feel nothing at the end of his career other than gratitude. Made up of long, wholesome conversations between real-life Japanese academic Hyakken Uchida (Tatsuo Matsumura) and his former students, the film finds plenty of wisdom in observing the little things. And as hard as his students try to make sure Uchida’s twilight years are as comfortable as possible, there’s still something elusive about this man overwhelmed by all the good and bad fortune in his life.

Visual artist Ann Oren’s first foray into feature-length filmmaking is a sensual delight and a gift that keeps on giving. Oren approaches her film with sincere dedication to every single building block: Piaffe looks, sounds, and feels sensational while being a fairly modest production. A true indie film, Piaffe verges on experimentation as a young woman named Eva (Simone Bucio) takes over the job of a foley artist from her sister. Even though she’s under-qualified, she tries her best t0 come up with the sounds for a horse-themed commercial to no avail. However, in the process, she notices a bump on her lower back that grows into a horse’s tail. Piaffe is a tale of metamorphosis, not only of the flesh, but also of the heart, as the themes it explores are also directly related to sexuality, submission, and, of course, love as a manifestation of all those things.

When forming a nation, governments would like to view the entire populace as one people– for example, the Norwegians live in Norway. But plenty of these nations have smaller populations of different ethnicities, some that have been on the land far longer than the nation itself. Pathfinder is the first ever feature film depicting the Sámi people, depicting one of their tales. The film plays out like a familiar folk adventure, where a boy comes of age through clever thinking, but it also mirrors their struggle to keep their culture from Norwegianization, to protect their people from extinction. Pathfinder may not have the best special effects, but there’s a beauty in the way writer-director Nils Gaup depicts his home county of Finnmark, and the way he depicts his people’s past.

Before Wong Kar Wai made his signature romantic dramas, he first made his directorial debut As Tears Go By, a film that wouldn’t be out of place in the crime and action flicks that characterized 1980s cinema. There are moments that feel a tad derivative, such as the use of Take My Breath Away from 1986’s Top Gun, and the gangster love triangle reminiscent of Martin Scorcese’s Mean Streets, but Wong’s style starts to peek through with his use of color and light, and of course, the distinctive blurred action that transforms movement into lines. It’s not as sleek as Wong’s better known works, but As Tears Go By is still a good film to watch, marking Wong as one of the biggest names in the then-emerging Hong Kong New Wave.

Anthology films are interesting because it’s not just one film on screen– it’s multiple stories, one after the other, that might have different plots, but share similar themes, ideas, and styles that the filmmaker(/s) would like to display. Involuntary does have five separate short films, but rather than play one by one, writer-director Ruben Östlund chops them up and alternates between them, starting with small instances where the group pushes someone into a behavior, then eventually escalating and accelerating into much more difficult consequences. This makes for a very slow start to the one and a half hour film, but it also allows Östlund some scope, with this simple group dynamic directly affecting larger ideas such as public morality, masculinity, and high-risk behavior in teens amongst others.