Top 100 European movies (imho)

The best film ever? well maybe not. But definitely the one that touches me the most. A great feature about how the giant machinery of war crushes heartlessly the little men trapped beneath it.
The most important thing in this film is how it depicts courage without heroism. The characters are not some kind of supermen. They are fallible and above all fear is constantly present as it seems humidity and cold. Even the sun looks wet, cold and fearful in this film.
In this film characters start being combatants out of free will and for noble cause, but they only go on fighting because that is the only way for them to survive. In a way, their fight is much closer from the gangsters v. police struggle than from the image of war cinema usually presents.
All the characters speak low as if they were afraid that death may hear them and pay attention to them. Moreover, the storyline is not constructed as any other. Instead of having a well structured narration leading gradually to a climax, here each scene is a new episode and the characters are somewhat astonished and happy to be still alive at that moment. They enjoy each moment simply because they are still breathing.
I also loved the modesty and the seamlessness of the camera work. There is no music and next to no artistry as it should when men and women are looking at their own death.

Certainly one of the best movies ever made. The actors are brilliant, specially the one playing Munch who has as well an amazing physical resemblance with the original.
This is also the only film of fiction that convincingly portraits the creativity required to paint, miles away from Vincent drinks and suddenly he sees the sunflowers blue. The director is an artist himself and uses all the possibilities given by the TV camera. The light and in general the ambiance is unique (cold and inspiring).
Despite the fact that Watkins latter said he did not like this bit of his work, the editing is wonderful. It is fast and it tells its own story. It allows Watkins to deal with the childhood memories but in the mean time to escape the Freudian interpretations.
There would be many other aspects of the film to praise (costumes, how it deals with Munch's influences, ?) but let me just say one last thing: watch it and you'll never thanks Watkins enough to have made the pleasure last 3 hours.

The perfect movie!

The black and white is gorgeous. The direction of actors, the construction of the scenes and the camera work are more than original, they are truly unique.

Unfortunately I saw it some time ago and I can't remember it as well as I would like to. For some reason it is impossible to find it in DVD. If any of you has any leverage on any production company, please have them print this movie, the world will be thankful.

An evocation of the 19th c. feminine condition in Europe where there is little choice, whether you work yourself to death or you become a prostitute. Under Verhoeven's eye it become an heroic struggle for life, featuring one of the best character in European cinema ever. A must see.

Good memories, but would really need to watch it again.

Wonderful!!!

First and foremost, there is the unique Charles Laughton. He steals the show. He is the example of what an actor should aim to be. Marlene is not too bad herself.

Then there is the pleasure of earing the English accent, the pleasure of following step by step a trial in the old London.

Just lovely dear.

Little doubts on my mind that this is the best film of 2008 by far.
First of all it is a true pound of pure intelligence and sensible creativity. It is totally humane, it is a political fight only driven by human feelings. No grand strategies nor statements about freedom, just raw courage, stupidity and the senselessness of the prison environment.
Michael Fassbender is glorious. Just fantastic. Nearly every sequence is brillant, technically perfect, original and full of meaning.
Of course it is gory at times and sometimes a bit too contemplative but the film is just brilliant.
For some reason, the conflict in Northern Ireland seems to have inspired some of the best movies of the past 30 years from the General to Elephant. Bravo maestro.

This is a unique movie.I don't rate it higher because the story is senseless, without the beginning of any interest and to say it simply, it is uninteresting and tedious. BUT, in terms of camera work it is certainly one of the best movies ever made.And I mean in the top ten. The camera is wonderfully fluid, the texture of the image is perfect. I recommend that no film director ever touches a camera without watching this film.
Another fantastic aspect of the film is the way the characters are constructed and the actors filmed. Instead of being a group which only exists because of the story that the author is telling, they are individuals with their problems and they are only reunited by chance. It gives a touch more than realistic to the film, it makes it real.
Unfortunately, it has been shot in 1968, and the director has heavily been influenced by the New Wave, so instead of telling his own story, he used the usual Truffaut-Godard crap (a film inside the film, violent death, the state is bad because it is the state). More than any film I've seen recently Reenactment makes me think that life is unfair.

It is a daring movie about a art of WWII rarely depicted: the uprising of Warsaw in 1944. In spirit it is close from such milestones as "A Man Escaped" and "The Army of Shadows", but it is formally less perfect.
I loved the part in the sewer. The platoon is properly eaten alive by the city they are fighting in. Fear is constant as at any second the Germans can drop a grenade, but the effect is somewhat lost by the fact that we a following many groups lost in the sewer instead of just one. The characters actually find themselves for most of the movie in a psychological state rarely described in film: they are so exhausted and bitter than for most of them every other feelings (honor, love, even self preservation) have been washed out.
Besides, some parts are a bit too romantic for an otherwise very tough film, part of it comes from the fact that the sewer is meant to symbolize Dante's "Inferno".
Some of the features of the book are very well integrated (the wandering civilians fleeing a illusionary gas attack represent very well the wandering souls of the dead) but other fail to really make sense (the character of the mad music composer is not really interesting). Besides, the score is poor and to mushy, it ruins certain scenes.
But overall the film is a real success. The fighters coming out of the sewer looking like dark and dirty devils is the kind of image that will last in my memory. I'd love to see a remake.

A wonderful movie about a world which has now totally disappeared: the traditional Mediterranean society. Honor was at its center, and honor was to be defended at all costs whatever the law said.
The film itself seems to be a die hard neorealist piece with all the qualities of its forefathers. In a way, it is a rural version of Ladri di Bicicletta. It is a touching story, a great work of art (at points you feel in the bush with the characters about to eat their cheese) and a rare documentary about those modernity overtook long ago.

I have seen it with a DJ and the mix of the two was pretty good.

An excellent film about a subject that usually creates the mushiest of them all (the father-daughter relationship). It is also a road movie. It's nice, it's fresh, it's well worth seeing.