Our reviewers select and review the best independent and foreign films on amazon.com, cd universe, and netflix

Title: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Year: 1962
Director: Tony Richardson
Writers: Alan Sillitoe, based on his short story.
Stars: Tom Courtenay, Michael Redgrave

The Story: Courtenay’s angry young man gets sent to a youth prison, where a cheerful warden tries to mold him into a long-distance runner, hoping that they can beat the boys from a nearby boarding school in an upcoming meet. As the young man prepares, he thinks about how he got there and what victory means to him.

Why It’s Great: The great British “angry young man” films of the early ’60s have become the forgotten missing link between the French New Wave and the American renaissance that flowered in the late ’60s. Richardson, Lester, Reisz, Anderson, et al. deserve to remain household names. This one only recently appeared on DVD, so it’s ripe for rediscovery. This has always been a favorite of mine (I took Betsy to see it at a revival house on one of our first dates) but seeing it again I can see how nicely it fits into my latest motto: “Anybody can be a hero, but nobody can become a hero by doing what anybody would do.” A hero’s triumph must stem from his unique personality. The ending of this movie may be the ultimate example of that.

Read more at Cockeyed Caravan.

Title: The Great McGinty
Year: 1940
Director: Preston Sturges
Writers: Preston Sturges
Stars: Brian Donlevy, Muriel Angelus, Akim Tamiroff, William Demarest

The Story: Donlevy is a two-fisted bum who gets offered two bucks to vote for a corrupt mayor, so he votes 37 times, under 37 different names. This so impresses the political machine that they make him a bagman, then an alderman, then mayor, then governor. Soon he has enough power to do whatever he wants, as long as he doesn’t want to do the right thing.

Why It’s Great: How does Sturges manage to be so big-hearted and black-hearted at the same time? He does it by keeping a bemused ear cocked for how people really talk when they get in over their head. Now matter how farcical each scene gets, Sturges shows an unswerving dedication to portraying the way the world really works. And he nails it: A patrician politician runs such a slimy political machine that the public finally turns on him. His bosses in the business community decide that they need to anoint their own “reform” candidate to run in the next election. They find a small cog in the Chicago machine whose primary value is that nobody has heard of him. This up-from-poverty plain-talker soon takes off on a meteoric rise to the top, but there’s just one catch: his backers require him to continue all the corruption of the crook he’s replacing. What a crazy story! I guess that’s what it was like way back when in the bad old days.

Read more about it at Cockeyed Caravan.

Title: Love and Death on Long Island
Year: 1996
Director: Richard Kwietniowski
Writers: Kwietniowski, based on the novel by Gilbert Adair
Stars: John Hurt, Jason Priestley, Fiona Loewi, Maury Chaykin

The Story: A tweedy English novelist and widower goes to see an E.M. Forster movie but accidentally walks into a theater showing a movie called Hotpants College 2. To his great surprise, the heretofore heterosexual author finds himself instantly smitten with the hunky young teen idol star. His new obsession takes over his whole life until he decides to move to the Hamptons town where the young star lives and lie his way into his life.

Why It’s Great: Hurt has had a long, great career as a character actor, but this was a rare, wonderful chance for him to finally take the lead and he proves more than up to the task. He’ll probably always be remembered most for his fatal stomachache in Alien, but this is his best screen role. The central joke here is that De’Ath is merely the last name of Hurt’s character. Let’s say that you’re a British writer. You know that there are people living on your island with the actual last name De’Ath (pronounced Day-Oth). But do you dare name a character that? It’s a bold move. Here it’s used cleverly to falsely foreshadow an unhappy ending that never comes. The title becomes a pun on how these things usually go. Even in independent film, hell– especially in independent film, repressed gay desire unleashed usually results in a bloody end. In real life, it tends to make people much, much happier.

Read more about it at Cockeyed Caravan.

Title: Metroland
Year: 1997
Director: Philip Saville
Writers: Adrian Hodges, based on the novel by Julian Barnes
Stars: Christian Bale, Emily Watson, Lee Ross, Elsa Zylberstein

The Story: In 1977 suburban England a married couple is visited a wild old friend who makes them wonder about their bourgeois choices in life. Soon the husband is flooded with memories of his first girlfriend, in Paris ten years earlier.

Why It’s Great: Nothing flashy or edgy here, just a simple bittersweet story about growing up and moving on, haunted by regrets. Bale is great in a role that’s less wild-eyed than his recent work. He was so much older then, he’s younger than that now. The long Paris flashback that makes up the middle of the movie is its own beautiful coming-of-age mini-movie. Bale’s Paris lover is, played by Elsa Zylberstein, is so impossibly adorable that we instantly understand why he fell in love and why it could never last. (And the sex will make you blush.) Last but not least, whatever happened to Emily Watson? She was in everything for a few years and then disappeared. She always had a lot going on behind her little smiles. She’s great as the passive aggressive wife here. Her husband assures her, “He really likes you, you know.” She responds with withering deadpan sarcasm: “Gosh. I feel somehow validated.”

Read more about it at Cockeyed Caravan.

Title: Salesman
Year: 1968
Writer-Directors: Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin
Stars: Paul “The Badger” Brennan, Charles “The Gipper” McDevitt, James “The Rabbit” Baker, Raymond “The Bull” Martos

The Story: Four increasingly desperate door-to-door bible salesmen bluff their way into working-class homes, trying to get wary housewives to buy a deluxe $50 bible on the installment plan.

How it Came to be Underrated: This is one of the most influential documentaries ever made, but most DVD renters wouldn’t know anything about that. You can still get people to watch ’60s verite classics like Don’t Look Back or Monterey Pop today, but the non-musical verites don’t get watched enough. This was an amazing new way to make documentaries, not based around a subject but around characters, just like a real movie. Though the “verite” movement stressed reality, eschewing voiceover or interviews, the Maysles and Zwerin unashamedly shape their footage into a traditional narrative, with winners and losers and villains and narrative arcs. We aren’t sure that we approve of these guys, but they become very sympathetic in comparison to their cold-blooded, glad-handing boss, who rides them hard and doesn’t want to hear any excuses. In my favorite scene, the boss blithely leads them through a role-play to show how easy it is. As soon as the salesmen get to role-play the reluctant customer, they revel in the chance to humiliate their boss with every baffling refusal they’ve ever heard. He doesn’t appreciate it.

More at Cockeyed Caravan!

Title: Scarlet Street
Year: 1945
Director: Fritz Lang
Writer: Dudley Nichols, based on the novel “La Chienne” by Georges De La Fouchardiere and Andre Mouezy-Eon
Stars: Edgar G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea

The Story: Robinson is a meek little bank clerk, unhappily married, who wants to be a painter, but he’s always had a problem with perspective. He falls under the spell of a femme fatale who falsely assumes that his odd little paintings are worth big money. Afraid to disillusion her, he has to support her with embezzled money. Things get complicated when her no-good boyfriend discovers that the paintings are worthless, and tries to get rid of them, but then the work belatedly gets discovered by the art world. In both situations, it is Robinson’s lack of perspective that ironically makes him a valuable commodity, for a short while, but it all comes crashing down.

Why It’s Great: Like a lot of movies that have entered the public domain, this was available for years only in truly terrible prints. Only recently did Kino begin to distribute a beautiful restoration. It’s gorgeous and reveals the film to be a masterpiece… I’m just going to say, this may now be my favorite Fritz Lang movie. Better than Metropolis. Better than M. Better than The Big Heat. I’ll go even further: it may be my favorite film noir! I’ve always loved it but the restored version finally reveals how perfect it really is: The script is ingenious. The performances are heartbreaking. The directing is passionate. This movieinterlocks plot and theme and symbolism and character with a microscopic level of clockwork precision. Joan Bennett is certainly my all-time favorite femme fatale. In many ways, she’s the most pitiless and cruel lover to ever be depicted on the screen. (He begs to paint her portrait, but she forces him to get on his knees and paint her toenails instead, sneering “they’ll be masterpieces.”) But Bennett’s astounding performance grants her a deep pool of vulnerability and, against all odds, sympathy. Her love for her secret sleazebag boyfriend Duryea is so naive, so overpowering, that the worse she treats Robinson, the more you pity her.

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Title: Below
Year: 2002
Director: David Twohy
Writers: Lucas Sussman & Darren Aronofsky and David Twohy
Stars: Bruce Greenwood, Olivia Williams, Matthew Davis, Holt McCallany, Zach Galifianakis

The Story: During World War II, a stir-crazy American submarine crew resuces the survivors of a British medical ship, but before they can get to shore, they come to fear that they are haunted by an malevolent spirt–a spirit that won’t be satisfied until it reveals a horrible secret held by certain members of the crew.

Why It’s Fun: I’ve tried to write “ghost who wants to expose an injustice” movies before and been stymied by a problematic question: are we rooting for the ghost or not? After all, the ghost is also endangering our heroes, who didn’t know about the injustice, but we want the truth to come out. This movie sidesteps those issues neatly, keeping the focus on the interpersonal and naval conflicts, relegating the supernatural to an elemental, unpersonified force. The conspiracy is handled well. The trick with conspiracy movies is that it has to be something that can come undone slowly. The heroes should only see a little problem at first, unraveling a string of little lies, one by one. The conspirators are then able to admit bits along the way, adjusting their story to stay out in front of the ultimate truth. The danger is that you wind up with one big “everything you know is wrong” reveal and the rest of the movie just lies there. Inevitably, you’ll have to reveal that big twist in the trailer, and then you’re left with nothing.

More at Cockeyed Caravan!

Title: Pulp
Year: 1972
Writer, Director: Mike Hodges
Stars: Michael Caine, Mickey Rooney, Lionel Stander, Lizabeth Scott, Al Lettieri

The Story: A cynical pulp novelist is hired to ghost-write the memoir of a mobbed-up Hollywood star in exile, who claims that people want to kill him. Nobody believes him, but then bodies start to pile up.

Why It’s Great: After the success of ultra-gritty neo-noir Get Carter, the writer/director, the star and the producer reunited to make this nutty follow-up, which bitterly disappointed their fans. It still hasn’t found its audience. Both movies have the general outline of crime stories, but that’s all they have in common. The grim seriousness of the previous movie was replaced with absurdist humor this time around. It’s an utterly bizarre movie, and you either go with it or you don’t, but I love it. Caine totally skewers the grim and gritty image he earned in the previous movie, choosing this time to play a self-deprecating coward that only pretends to be a tough guy when it suits him. It was Caine’s way of letting the world know that, however much they wanted him to be a leading man, he would always be a character actor at heart.

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Title: Hamlet 2
Year: 2008
Director: Andrew Fleming
Writers: Fleming and Pam Brady
Stars: Steve Coogan, Catherine Keener, Amy Poehler, Elisabeth Shue, Melanie Diaz, Phoebe Strole

The Story: A deranged public school theater director decides to save the drama program by writing and staging “Hamlet 2″, a highly-personal musical saga involving Jesus, time travel and daddy issues.

Why It’s Great: This got good reviews and a big sale at Sundance, which predictably caused a backlash when it got its wide release several months later. This time, the critics trashed it for no good reason. That’s a shame, because it’s wild, smart and hilarious. It’s hard to make a good comedy about bad art without being overly-snotty towards your characters. You’re laughing at them for doing the same thing you’re attempting. But this movie succeeds by respecting his process, as terrible as it is. His saving grace is that he listens to every criticism and begs his critics for help. Coogan ultimately discovers that creating crappy art is still a valuable process because it works a lot of your own crap out of your system. This leads to some tricky areas for comedy, like a song about molestation. There’s been a lot of “anything goes” comedies recently about uncomfortable subjects, but I rarely find them funny. Coogan makes it work by allowing his character to feel sympathetic pain beneath the surface of his outrageous behavior.

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Title: 49^th Parallel aka The Invaders
Year: 1941
Director: Michael Powell
Writer: Emeric Pressburger, story co-written with Rodney Ackland
Stars: Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier, Raymond Massey, Anton Walbrook, Eric Portman, Glynis Johns (The Court Jester)

Why It’s Great: Though it did win a screenplay Oscar, Americans aren’t big fans of movies that imply we’re a bunch of Nazi-loving shirkers who lack the courage of our neighbors to the north. As a result, this hasn’t been re-run anywhere near as often as other WW2 classics. Powell’s more personal movies, like Black Narcissus, were bizarrely expressionist, but he was equally good at making straightforward nail-biters. Of course, they always reflected his ear for ironic dialogue, his love for quirky personalities, and his flinty humanism. Since it was a good script for a good cause, this attracted an all-star line up both in front of and behind the camera (it was edited by David Lean and shot by his future collaborator Freddie Young) Olivier was the biggest star at the time but he gives the weakest performance, chewing the scenery as a broadly-sketched French-Canadian trapper. He doesn’t stick around for very long, though, as there’s still a long parade of heroic Canadians to showcase.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…