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

Pusher (Denmark 1996, 105 min, dir: Nicolas Winding Refn, cast: Kim Bodina, Laura Drasbaek, Zlatko Buric )

Frank (Kim Bodina) loses the dope, is broke, and the drug boss Milo (Zlatko Buric) wants his money. What else is new in the underworld? But Pusher is a breakthrough movie. When it was made, well before Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s film,21 Grams, Brian De Palma’s Scarface was still the model for a pusher movie.

Pusher built the genre in a different direction. Dope dealer Frank is not misunderstood or charmingly lethal. He is just a nice average guy trying to dig himself out of a hole that keeps getting deeper while Vic, the girl who loves him (Laura Drasback), stands by hoping he’ll figure it out.

Refn creates a documentary style to follow the action in long takes and subjective pans to cover dialogue between characters. If it looks familiar now, it is because half a dozen TV police shows use it. His inspiration was not police stories, it was horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre he watched as a child.

The director’s genius is building off-beat characters that start out unlikeable and slowly make us warm to them as they struggle but miss all chances at redemption. Pusher, Pusher 2, Pusher 3 and Drive follow this model.

Best to see all of these together. They offer lessons in cinema style as well as consistent character development. Drive is an American movie (MovieWithMe) but it follows the same rules of Refn’s view of characters: the arc goes through thwarted expectations to thwarted resolution.

This single-minded vision is probably what has protected Refn in the transition to Hollywood films. It is also what probably got him thrown out of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts when he threw a table at the wall in an argument with a teacher.

Let It Rain (France 2008, 110 min, dir: Agnes Jaoui, cast: Agnes Jaoui, Jean Pierre Bacri, Jamel Debbouze).

Is it the director’s revenge to cast your husband as the asshole? Agnes Jaoui is an excellent French actress who directs her second film Let it Rain. Her real life husband, Jean Pierre Barci plays Michel, an oafish video maker who is making a documentary about her.

She’s running for the legislature representing a section of Provence. Actually the district is called Rhone-Alps. We know this because the financial key to many French films making a deal with one of the regions (departments) to promote tourism. They give you production money and you try to feature their landscape, towns, hotels, and restaurants.

Agnes, as Agatha, undergoes a tireless round of family squabbles and minor irritations in her quest to win the election. Michel and his brighter sidekick, Karim (Jamel Debbouze) never seem to be able to say “action” and “cut” in sync.

So it goes. The film has a woman director’s touch in lingering moments between Agatha sister, her children, and a somewhat estranged male companion. One of the standout elements of the film, besides a good catalogue of places to eat and sleep in Rhone-Alps (you can watch this film while open to Trip Advisor)– is the music. Mostly Schubert but supplemented with wild brass band music from Santiago de Cuba. It gives us a taste of the unique sound of this east end of Cuba city usually eclipsed by Havana sounds.

After noting restaurants for your next visit to France, it’s worth a click to iTunes to download a sample from Santiago de Cuba. All your friends will marvel at the range of your tastes.

Soul Kitchen (Germany 2009, 99 min, dir: Fatih Akin, cast: Adam Bousdoukos, Mortiz Bleibtreu).

A Turkish director makes a film about a Greek restaurateur in Hamburg, Germany. Soul Kitchen is no Euro Pudding: the derogatory name given to coproductions that pluck money from several countries and weave a mix of actors, locations, and crew to take advantage of money-saving treaties.

The mystery here is not why anyone would make this very lively and pleasant film, but why Fatih Aikin made it? His more soulful films include Head On and The Edge of Heaven (MovieWithMe). In contrast, Soul Kitchen is a bouncy stories about an ambitious young business hustler (Adam Bousdoukos),who manages to overcome a temperamental chef (Morirz Bleibtreu), an absentee girlfriend, and a host of other characters and crazies: All to make a success of his soulful little eatery.

Fatih Akin grew up in the Turkish community of Hamburg. The Germans invited thousands of Turks to become guest workers in the auto plants in the 1970′s when business was booming and their was a labor shortage. They never dreamed that forty years later the Turks would still be there. It is now common to see women on the streets with chadors over their faces. The Kruetzburg district of Berlin has the best Turkish food west of Istanbul and east of New York.

It’s not easy growing up in a foreign culture that is your culture. Especially when the “foreign” and “your” are forever confused. If only the Germans would see you as one of them rather “them.” Some of Aikin’s acclaimed films offer glimpses of what this cultural confusion is like.

But Soul Kitchen is the froth on a cappuccino by comparison. Maybe he took a break from deep melodrama to make it. Maybe the burden of telling the Turkish story is lifting.

And maybe it was time to make a film that was just good entertainment. Take your pick of motives. The watchable result is all that matters.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (USA 2010, 112 minutes, dir: Edgar Wright, cast: Michael Cera, Ellen Wong, Mary Elizabeth Winstead).

Michael Cera, as Scott Pilgrim, has less sexuality than a monkey. Once you can get by his lusting after the unattainable girl in the red wig, this film is one of the more imaginative young love movies of recent times.

It is also one of the few movies shot in Toronto that is actually set in Toronto. Budget filmmakers love to shoot Toronto for New York or Chicago or just about any big city because it looks like just about any big city. Although, to be fair, no New York director would confuse Manhattan and Toronto.

The story is minimal: Scott is a gee wiz kid living with his slacker buddies and second guitar in their band. Romona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is a recent transplant from New York who appears in the mix of young adults trying to find direction. (She comes to Toronot to find herself? She could have gone to Yonkers).

Soctt persues, she resists. Meanwhile Scott has been dating a high school girl (Ellen Wong) who fights Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead )at every opportunity to keep her man (why does she want him? Never answered).

The strength of Scott Pilgrim vs. The Word is not the story but the style. Director Edgar Wright inserts words, titles, comic book “Pow” and “Crash” in a way that tries to emmulate the graphic novel origins of the story. He suceeds in punching up a ho hum tale with cleverness.

The merger of the graphic novel style with live action film is a next step in evolution of visual presentation, and this movie is enjoyable as a fluffy fling and also, at a future point, a benchmark along the way to a graphic movie form we are only just discovering.

Love Ranch (USA 2010, 117 min, dir: Taylor Hackford, cast: Helen Mirren, Joe Pesci, Sergio Peris-Mencheta).

Helen Mirren has a few sexy miles left in her even when surrounded by a trailer full of gorgeous Nevada whores half her age. She climbs into bed with Spanish hunk Sergio Peris-Mencheta (Armando) who is 30 years her junior.

Why would the actress who won an Oscar for playing Queen Elizabeth (The Queen) want to play the wife and partner of a desert brothel owner (Joe Pesci)? Probably for the same reason Meryl Streep followed It’s Complicated with The Iron Lady.

Actresses of a certain age (Mirren was born in 1945, Streep claims 1949) need to follow class with ass or visa versa. Otherwise they only get offered the roles for wordly wise, flinty, post menopausal grand dames. No one wants to be told, “you’d be perfect as Mother Teresa.”

Love Ranch is very very loosely based on the goings on at the Mustang Ranch near Las Vegas. Charlie (Joe Pesci) and Grace (Helen Mirren) run the joint successfully until Charlie decides they should branch out into the prize fight business. Armando is an Argentine boxer down on his luck. The real Sergio Peris-Mencheta ia actually a Spanish heart throb from Mardrid. He pucnhes his way into Grace’s tough-love heart. His performance is worth the movie.

Digesting the plot requires some teeth gnashing, but there are so many really good scenes you (almost) forgive the rest. Taylor Hackford started his career in documentaries, and maybe this vison of hot sex on the cold desert plateau based on a true story was a reminder of his doc days working for Public TV.

Or maybe it was a chance to give his wife, Helen Mirren, a sexy star turn to wash away the preception that she was more regal than Queen Elizabeth.

Funny how male English actors don’t suffer from being called Sir or Lord, but if a woman is called Dame she’s expected to wear long skirts and go teas. Love Ranch has Helen Mirren playing a nude love scene. See it; because it may be the last time anyone wants to look.

Centurion (UK 2010, 97 min. dir: Neil Marshall, cast: Michael Fassbender, Olga Kurylenko, Imogen Poots).

Running movies never run out of breath. The curious question with Michael Fassbdender is: after revealing the super size of his penis in Shame, how he can run at all?

Centurion takes us to Britain in about 100 AD where the Romans have met their Afghanistan. Their idea was to bring civilization to the wild country up north; but it has pretty much failed. Picts and Brigantes roam the Highlands picking off the Romans with what will, a few thousand years later, be called guerilla warfare.

All of this really doesn’t matter much in a Neil Marshall movie (Descent, Dog Soldiers). The important concept in any running movie is to get them running. The best stripped down example is Cornel Wilde’s The Naked Prey.

Cornel (Kornel Lajos Weisz: nobody is born with a name like Cornel Wilde) is leading a hunting party into darkest Africa when they violate some tribal rules of hospitality. All the white men are captured and roasted alive or worse.

But they’ve got another game for Cornel. They strip him naked, set him running, and send the warriors after him to kill him. That’s the whole move, and it’s actually excellent.

In Centurion, the Roman 9^th legion is destroyed in a battle with the Picts when their Brigantian scout, lovely Etain (former James Bond girl Olga Kurylenko), turns out to be working for the Picts. The Roman general is captured while a handful of dazed soldiers surreptitiously crawl out from under the dead.

They go to the Pict camp to save the general, but end up killing the chieftain’s little son. He’s so upset that he has Etain duel it out with the general and kill him. Next he sends his warriors out to slash down Quintas Dias (Michael Fassbender) and his gang. They keep running until they meet Arianne (Imogen Poots) who is so beautiful it is worth staying a while. She’s an outcast accused of witchcraft and takes a liking to Quintas (although it may be she likes the part of him he’ll reveal in Shame).

He leaves her to run into Hadrian’s Wall (under construction at the time). He’s a liability to the Romans because he knows they are losing. General Hadrian has his daughter try to kill him (women are the master assassins in this movie). Quintas runs away and joins Arianne in her clay and wattle hovel. He’s going to hang up his Nikes and stay put for a while.

Don’tt expect to learn much about Roman history in Centurion, or to understand why all the Roman’s speak good British English and all the Picts use subtitles. Just enjoy the jog.

The Misfortunates (Belgium 2009, 108 min, dir: Felix Van Groeningen, cast: Kenneth Vanbaeden, Valentijn Dhaenens, Koen De Graeve, Wouter Hendrickx, Johan Heldenbergh, Bert Haelvoet, Gilda De Bal).

All Belgium is divided into two parts: both equally disgusting. Wallonia is the French speaking south and Flanders is the Dutch speaking north. Memorable moments in the south include the man made tourist hill that desecrates the battlefield of Waterloo. The north features stinky rail stations, diesel fumes, and one excellent national dish: French fries.

It is no wonder Belgium filmmakers produce mainly comedies. The whole country is a bad joke. In Paris they don’t tell Polish jokes, they tell Belgium jokes.

In this maze of train tracks, unpronounceable town names, and badly poured concrete; director Felix Van Groeningen introduces us to the Strobbes. Four grown brothers, their mother, and a thirteen-year-old son of one of the brothers make up this household.

Activates include beer drinking, swearing, dressing up as women, drinking, naked bike races, drinking, and trying to get that final gulp before the shakes hit you so bad you can’t hold your glass. Finding humor in all this is Van Groeningen’s art and he does it very well. At first you want young Gunther (Kenneth Vanbaeden) to escape. Later you think, escape to what? The adult version of Gunther (Valentijn Dhaenens) still lives by the railroad tracks and is poor, but now he is an author writing about this brilliant time in his life that we see in flashbacks.

How can you hate guys who make fun of the prim social worker sent to check on young Gunther when her name is Miss Fockaday? The film is like a Sunday afternoon in a roadhouse bar where you might as well join the party because they’re having such a good time.

The Chaser (Korea, 2008, 125 min, dir: Hong-jin Na, cast: Yun-seok Kim, Yoo-jeong Kim, Jung-woo Ha).

Along with apple pie, the US culture can take credit for police procedural and gangster films. Competition is heating up in Korea, France, Denmark, Brazil and a handful of other countries where directors have learned the art of the car chase, the interrogation, the cynical rogue cop and the clever psychopath.

In The Chaser, Joon-ho Eom ( Yun-seok Kim) is the rogue cop turned pimp who sends his girls out to the grittier districts of Seoul. When one of them sends panicked cell phone calls back to him he frantically tries to find her and save her. She’s disappeared but the killer is in plain site.

Without evidence, and scorned by the police he once worked with; Joon-ho starts a long slog to bring down the killer (Jung-woo Ha). Along the way he bursts into his former whore/employee’s apartment for evidence and meets her little daughter (Yoo-jeong Kim).

From then on the movie has to follow the inevitable march to a life or death fight with the killer while the hero takes care of, and falls for, the adorable precocious child.

It all sound like we’ve seen it before, but the strength is in the delivery. Pathos, comedy, and great fights. The Casher is writer/director Hong-jin’s first film. The Yellow Sea is his second. He’s worth a look at both films.

Spoken Word (USA 2009, 116 min, dir: Victor Nunez, cast: Kuno Becker, Ruben Blades, Persia White).

No modern film I can remember is about poetry. Not the kind you read in high school English class, but the slam poetry that is a form of rap with rhythm but no melody. Spoken Word attempts to supply the melody.

Cruz (Kuno Becker) is a west coast poet living sensually with girl friend Shea (Persia White) and teaching poetry to high school kids. He gets a phone call from New Mexico saying his father (Ruben Blades) is dying of cancer and he must come home.

The film has all the usually suspected traumas of returning home again; including alcohol and drugs. Somehow it all looks like a lot cleaner when you throw the empty bottles against adobe walls that look out over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

What distinguishes Spoken Word is not story words, but poetry words. Cruz speaks them eloquently to articulate his journey. The words belong to the poet Joe Ray Sandoval, who collaborated on the screenplay. But the movie belongs to director Victor Nunez.

He specializes in small stories supplying much feeling but not much conflict. Ulee’s Gold, Ruby in Paradise, and Gal Young ‘Un are other good examples. It is not easy to be the go to filmmaker for offbeat, sentimental subjects and Nunez is kind of the Sundance pro.

Like many Nunez movies, you keep waiting in Spoken Word for something to happen and then realize, at the end, that it already did.The journey is the objective, the poetry is the force, and this small movie is as gold as the honey that Ulee makes it his backyard honeypot.

Holly Rollers (USA 2010, 89 min, dir: Kevin Asch, cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Bartha (best friend), Ari Graynor (girl), Danny A. Abeckaser, Mark Ivanir).

Poor Jesse Eisenberg, he’ll always be the Jew. If you look through his credits he’s played guys named Eli, Daniel, Benjamin and Mark (twice). In Holy Rollers he is Sam Gold, and orthodox black hat Jew in Williamsburg, Brooklyn who forsakes davening for the drug trade.

Eisenberg is an excellent actor and director Kevin Asch makes the point in his movie (based on a real story) that if you take away the tzitzis and black coats, these guys and their girl (Ari Graynor) are no different than any other punk Ecstasy pushers.

When you look at Jesse dressed up as a Hassid, you can’t help thinking what Mark Zuckerberg might look like if Facebook went kosher. Zuck might be one of the richest men in the word but he has the sex appeal of a gnat.

One scene that also gives some deja vu thoughts in Holy Rollers is when Sam’s (Jesse Eisenberg’s) father sits him down at the dining room table and says the Rabbi told him Sam is not coming to shul anymore. Sam tries to regain his father’s confidence by telling him he is still religious and his goal is still to be among the faithful; but to no avail.

We’ve been here before. Let’s flash back to 1927 and The Jazz Singer (or 1952 or 1980 for the remakes). Al Jolson tells his father he wants to sing jazz, not kol nidre, and is disowned. Holy Rollers gives it new twist. Now it’s ‘Dad, what I really want to do is deal drugs.”