It’s about the mystery of identity and how one can find identity by taking on the identity of something other, or can find it when looking in a mirror-not for the physical self but for the spirit. Atlantics is about that and it’s about the breaking of that. That it might look and sound so alien to an American watching this film on Netflix is perhaps a sharp enough indictment of the ways in which we intellectually seclude ourselves from realities beyond our own. Through the gritty, blustery opening images shot as artful document of the Dakar shore (outstanding work by cinematographer Claire Mathon) and the hypnotic electronic score by Fatima Al Qadiri, Diop is able to evoke an incomparable mood and sense of place. She takes the magic realism of a peer like Alice Rohrwacher and carries it to the world’s margins, examining class struggle in a Senegalese city by the Atlantic. Stars: Mame Bineta Sane, Amadou Mbow, Nicole Sougou, Aminate KaneĪtlantics is quite the announcement for writer-drector Mati Diop. It’s almost unbearable, but we bear it because we care about these people we’ve become involved with. So that when we come to that point late in Roma, we don’t even realize the slow, organic process by which we’ve been invested fully into the film we’re not ready to be hit as hard as we are when the wallops come and the waves crash. The result is a singular film experience, one that recreates something that was lost and then navigates it in such a way as to find the emergent story, then from that to find the emotional impact. Perhaps they’re not wrong, but it is to Cuarón’s immense credit as a thoughtful technician and storyteller that he does, in fact, pull it off. Reserved and immersive, introspective and outward-looking, old and new-some have accused Roma of being too calculated in what it tries to do, the balancing act it tries to pull off. But the base aesthetic and narrative is Fellini, or long-lost Mexican neorealism, or Tati’s Playtime but with sight gags replaced by social concern and personal reverie. The sound mix is Dolby Atmos and enveloping. The camera gazes and moves in trans-plane sequencing, giving us foreground, mid-ground and background elements in stark digital clarity. Not even entirely focused on her, perhaps more focused on its classicist compositions of a place that no longer exists in the way Cuarón remembers it. The camera sits back, black-and-white, focused not on the bourgeois children that represent the cinematographer-writer-director and his siblings growing up in Mexico City several decades ago, but moreso on the indigenous woman (Yalitza Aparicio) that cares for them and the household. Stars: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Diego Cortina Autrey, Carlos PeraltaĪlfonso Cuarón’s most intimate film is also his most distancing. With this out-and-out masterpiece, del Toro cemented his position as one of this generation’s most exciting and talented visionaries. Pan’s Labyrinth oozes atmosphere with its stunning cinematography and production values, all guided by del Toro’s keen artistic vision. Simultaneously a war saga and a fairy tale, it traces the journey of a young girl and her scavenger hunt through another world to save her mother’s life, set in the midst of the Spanish civil war. One of the most imaginative films of the 21st century, Guillermo del Toro’s Spanish fable is a triumph of storytelling and nothing short of a work of art. Stars: Ivana Baquero, Sergí Lopez, Maribel Verdu, Alex Angulo, Doug Jones Here are the 30 Best Foreign-Language Movies on Netflix: The list includes movies from a dozen different languages from a dozen or more different countries-from traditional cinema powerhouses like France, Italy and Japan to more recent centers of creativity like South Korea, Brazil and even the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. We scoured Netflix’s international movie offerings for our favorites. While Hollywood still dominates the box office, art houses and services like Netflix have given us easy access to films from around the globe. For a century, cinema has helped us glimpse life in countries where we may never set foot. Nowhere is this more apparent than in foreign-language films. Movies have the wonderful ability to shift perception and help you to see and understand the other.
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