Wayland Library Movie Picks - Foreign

Three young, unemployed Frenchmen living in the ghettos surrounding Paris get embroiled in a violent conflict with the local police.

Sing, a hapless gangster, must overcome his inability to wield a knife and demonstrate his mettle in order to become a member of the notorious Axe Gang. He realizes he is the greatest kung fu master of them all, destined to protect the sacred streets.

Cloaked in a comedy of manners, this scathing critique of corrupt French society is about a weekend hunting party at which amorous escapades abound among the aristocratic guests, which are also mirrored by the activities of the servants downstairs.

Drama about the theater and the individuals that made the stage their life. Includes the love story of four men for one woman.

A dark fable set five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Eleven-year-old Ofelia comes face to face with the horrors of fascism when she and her pregnant mother are uprooted to the countryside, where her new stepfather, a sadistic captain in General Franco's army, hunts down Republican guerrillas who refuse to give up the fight. The violent reality in which she lives merges seamlessly with a fantastical interior world when Ofelia meets a...

Mija is a beautiful woman in her sixties who moves gracefully through life, contemplating a trivial daily routine that is ill-suited to her refined persona. On a whim, Mija enrolls in a poetry class at the local cultural center and begins a personal quest to find the perfect words to describe her feelings. However, she's appreciate the wonders of the natural world, but a school girl's suicide initiates a chain of tragic events that will change her...

When a massive gilled monster emerges from the deep and tears through the city, the government scrambles to save its citizens. A ragtag team of volunteers cuts through a web of red tape to uncover the monster's weakness and its mysterious ties to a foreign superpower. But time is not on their side: the greatest catastrophe to ever befall the world is about to evolve right before their very eyes.

A zeitgeist-defining sensation that distilled a global reckoning over class inequality into a tour de force of pop-cinema subversion, this is Bong Joon Ho's genre-scrambling black-comic thriller. Two families in Seoul, one barely scraping by in a dank semi-basement in a low-lying neighborhood, the other living in luxury in a modern architectural marvel overlooking the city, find themselves on a collision course that will lay bare the dark contradictions...

"City of God tells a powerful true story of crime and redemption. The streets of the world's most notorious slum, Rio de Janeiro's 'City of God,' are a place where combat photographers fear to tread, police rarely go and residents are lucky if they live to the age of 20. In the midst of the oppressive crime and violence, a frail and scared young boy will grow up to discover that he can view the harsh realities of his surroundings differently -- with...

Unfolding in a series of mythic vignettes, this late work by Akira Kurosawa brings eight of the beloved director's own nighttime visions, informed by tales from Japanese folklore, to cinematic life.