Top Ten Movies from the Rest of the WorldPrevious articles in this series looked at the best films from Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Here's the best of the rest of the planet, as chosen by two of our critics.By Agnieszka Tennant and Stefan Ulstein |
posted 9/14/2004
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Understated humor makes the movie delightful, for example at a time when a Christian truck driver flees from Dora after he realizes that she wants to get to know him, but more in the biblical sense. Dora's spiritual 180 is complete in the middle of a religious pilgrimage. Then she becomes a different kind of a letter writer—one whose pen is guided by the opposite of her previous motivation, greed.
Content: It's rated R for language, but the way it evokes empathy and kindness from its heroine, and—likely—the viewers, makes it worth seeing with mature, discerning teenagers.
City of God
(Brazil, 2002)
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
City of God is one of these movies that hurt. But the pain of facing its cruel landscape is an appropriate price of introduction to children growing up in a Rio de Janeiro ghetto.
Casting young people from an actual housing development for the homeless, the film focuses on a promising teenager named Rocket who wants to be a photographer. The questions director Fernando Meirelles has us asking as a result are much like those an inner-city minister in Chicago or Los Angeles might ask: What are the chances that a child raised in public housing run by gangs will reject the life of crime and corruption? And, more broadly: To what degree does an environment rub off on a person? When does a victim become an offender? Finally: How much are the violent drug lords like us?
Content: This Brazilian GoodFellas is filled with disturbing violence—done to children and by children. While the brutality is authentic and not gratuitous, only mature audiences can withstand it.
Like Water for Chocolate
(Mexico, 1992)
Directed by Alfonso Arau
"We Mexicans are emotional people," Alfonso Arau said at a Seattle Film Festival interview. "And we like it that way." Arau said that his film, based on the novel by his wife, Laura Esquivel, celebrates the emotional, spiritual, sensual side of Mexico. "Most of us are at least part Indian," he said, "But for too long we have denied it, wanting to be European."
Like Water for Chocolate is filmed in a mystical style that stands outside of time and the laws of physics. The title refers to the way Mexicans use boiling water, rather than milk, for hot chocolate. When a person is romantically infatuated, he is said to be in a state "like water for chocolate." In this film, Tita and Pedro are in love, but Tita's Mamá Elena wants Tita to remain single, stay at home and be her caregiver in old age. She forbids the marriage. The rest is up to love and food. Many a viewer has been driven to the nearest Mexican restaurant after seeing Like Water for Chocolate, a hugely entertaining and life-affirming film that helps us understand the blend of Catholic and indigenous beliefs and the mixture of Spanish and Indian cultures that make Mexico such a vibrant, fascinating country.
Content: Rated R for sexuality and brief nudity. Suitable for adults only.
Maria Full of Grace
(Peru/Colombia/USA, 2004)
Directed by Joshua Marston
Maria, a marginally employed Colombian woman who finds herself pregnant, is recruited by a smarmy drug dealer to serve as a "mule," smuggling drugs into the U.S. She naively agrees to swallow condom encased drugs, which may rupture and kill her if they are not retrieved soon enough.
She balks when she considers the damage to her and her baby, and the possibility of time in an American prison. The drug dealers remind her that they know where her family lives. Maria is aware that if she fails, or if even one capsule goes missing, her family will be murdered. In America she escapes from the dealers and finds solace in a Colombian-American community, but the dealers won't let her go.
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