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

Gloomy Sunday (Hungary, 1999, 112 min. Rolf Schubel, cast: Erika Marozsan, Joachim Krol, Ben Becker, Stefano Dionisi)

A love triangle ends in suicide over a song. Or is it resentment of the Nazi general who can order the piano player to play his favorite tune? The most amazing thing about Gloomy Sunday is how well it plays as a three-course melodrama in a restaurant that serves too much schmaltz.

The Jewish owner of a successful Budapest restaurant, Szabos, keeps them coming back for his special beef roll dish and his gifted piano player who composes the theme everybody wants to hear with their dessert. He’s in love with his beautiful waitress, and she’s in love with the new piano player. The two men decide to share her. A German businessman is in love with both the food and the waitress. He gets big portions but no love. Later he becomes a Nazi commander, stationed in Budapest. He sneaks off to the Jewish-owned restaurant for a good meal, a couple of tunes, and schnapps with his old friends.

Hans (Ben Becker) promises Lazlo (Joachim Krol) that he will spare him deportation. Just in case, Lazlo puts the restaurant in Ilona’s (Erika Marozsan’s) name. Hans reneges, Lazlo is rounded up, and Ilona sleeps with Hans to save Lazlo. It doesn’t work, Hans sends Lazlo to the camps anyway.

The peculiar, and endearing part of Gloomy Sunday is that everyone, save the piano player, seems to make an interesting life accommodation to time and circumstances. The two men understand they are rivals but Ilona won’t choose, so they share her. She becomes the helpmate to both. Lazlo insinuates himself in her love for the piano player by becoming his career manager and insuring the success of his song. The girl sleeps with the Nazi when she must, and the Nazi tries to shows, in his dying moment, that his betrayal was over love.

In the end, Ilona is left with the son she bore from her long ago liaison with the piano player. They toast to the past in the restaurant she now runs. If this isn’t the stuff of grand opera it should be. It’s from a novel by Nick Barkow, called A Song of Love and Death. This is a much better title than Gloomy Sunday and a hint that great melodrama awaits. Nothing wrong with melodrama if you are expecting it, and this is Gloomy Sunday’s real strength.

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.

More at Cockeyed Caravan!

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.

More at Cockeyed Caravan!

Facing Windows (Italy, 2003, min,102, dir: Verzan Ozpetek, cast: Giovanna Mezzogiomo, Massimo Girotti, Raoul Bova, Flippo Nigro, Serra Yimaz)

Most of us are secret voyeurs when it comes to watching the action in the window across the street, but do we ever think they are watching us just as intensely? A dull marriage is the best reason to take a look at the hunk in the apartment across the way while peeling onions. When Giovanna finally meets him and sees the view from his apartment, she understands his fascination for her too.

Let’s backtrack. Giovanna is played by Giovanna Mezzogiomo, daughter of the famous Italian director Vittorio Mezzogiomo and the actress, Cecilia Sacchi. She’s beautiful, luscious, sexy, and totally not working class. So you’ve got to separate this film into parts to appreciate it. The lustful part about a woman fantasizing about an affair with the neighbor across the courtyard, and his fantasy of her: is imaginative an titillating. The rest is problematic (that’s a nice way of saying not quite believable).

Feeling overwhelmed and stuck in a dull marriage, Giovanna begins refocusing her attention (or repressing her emotions) by caring for the Jewish Holocaust survivor her husband brings home one day. As Giovanna reflects on her life, she turns to the man who lives across from her and whose window faces hers.

Giovanna is married to Flippo, a truck driver on the night shift. She hates her life as an accountant in a chicken killing plant, and she has no passion for her husband. This is even more true after he picks up an old man (Massimo Girotti) wandering in the street one day who claims he can not remember who he is. Later we learn he is a famous pastry chef, and a holocaust survivor who lost his only true love (male) to the Nazis.

Why he keeps up the ruse of not remembering and how it leads into Giovanna trusting him as a substitute for the parent she never had is a mystery the screenwriter has not solved. Mr. Pastry also gives her guidance in her marriage (she is about to have an affair with Lorenzo, the man who lives across from her kitchen window and she is obsessed with watching), and her career (he shows her how to make great pastry and urges her to find herself.)

She makes pastry and plans the affair with Lorenzo. All goes well until she sees the view of her life from HIS window, where he has been obsessed with watching her too.Now she must choose between the lover (who is conveniently about to move away and invites her along) and the life of a chicken plucker accountant. I won’t give away the ending.

Amazingly, you forgive the inconsistencies and conveniences in the plot because Giovanna is so interesting to watch and her story, a woman’s story, seems to resonate so universally.

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…

Nina’s Tragedies (Israel 2003, 110 min, dir: Savi Gavison, cast: Ayelet Zurer, Alon Elkabeth, Shmil Ben Ari).

Young Nadav lusts after his sexy Aunt Nina by peeping in her window and writing lustful stories in his diary about her. When Nina’s husband dies in a bomb incident while in the Army reserves, Nadav’s mother sends him temporarily to live with Aunt Nina so she won’t be alone. From the spare room he gets to observe all the twists and tragedies of her love life.

Soon Annon installs himself as her perfect lover. Actually he was part of the Army detail who came to inform her of her husband’s death (in a great bit of humor, they soldiers on the detail get the wrong apartment and inform the wrong widow. She faints, but manages to scream out “You want Entrance B” as she recovers. (the unit next door-see the clip).

Annon is everything Nina wants. He is sensitive to the point of crying, he is poetic, and he is dedicated. He also has a girl friend. What make Nina’s Tragedies so watchable are the little twists between tragedy and humor. Like the naked man Nina sees in the street who resembles her husband. He turns out to be the boyfriend of a Russian woman who is a buddy of Nadav’s peeping Tom accomplice. So it goes.

The film would not have worked if not for Shmil Ben Ari (Annon), who seduces not by sweeping Nina off her feet, but by crying over her tragedies. What an original twist on a guy trying to prove he is sensitive. Meanwhile Nadav is coming of age in this cozy world of lust and irony.

Some movies work so much better on the small screen, and I think this is one of them. In a theater Annon’s crying would be unsettling. We would think, “Get over it.” On an intimate screen his over-the-top emotions are just perfect.

This film is an old favorite of mine and seeing it again after all these years didn’t disappoint. It’s wonderful. However, a cautionary note needs to be sounded.

This movie is sentimental. It’s politically incorrect. It is not Ireland. If these sorts of things get your shorts in a knot, avoid this movie.

The Ireland of The Quiet Man is an Ireland that never existed. It is loaded with every Irish cliche imaginable. For all I know, this movie is responsible for generating many of them. While it doesn’t include leprechauns, it might as well with the drunken Irish priest played by Barry Fitzgerald (Going My Way).

So what is this movie? It’s the other side of the John Ford coin. As a director, he may have been the apotheosis of the American macho Hollywood filmmakers of the 40s and 50s. Like Howard Hawks, his films were about men – stoic and tough and articulated best through John Wayne. It was directors such as these that made the western what it was, creating the formula that would be worked and reworked and improvised on in so many later films.

Despite their surface toughness though, all these films were high romanticism. They were idealized images of what men were or should be. The North American stoic is, like the cynic, an inverted romantic.

The movie The Quiet Man perfectly illustrates this. Keep in mind that this is a movie made by the same man who gave us Stagecoach, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande and The Searchers.

This time, however, rather than the spare-talking tough warrior, we see the Ford male in domestic surroundings. The warrior at home, as it were; the patriarch in love.

And if the westerns and war films are excessively tough-minded, here we see the same excess mirrored as sentimentality. Everything is idealized (hence, the Ireland we see). Everything is fantasy.

Essentially, it is a fairy tale and one that works tremendously well. A large part of the reason for this is the pairing of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara (Miracle On 34th Street). They always worked well together but never more so than in this movie.

And the relationship they have – at odds, somewhat embattled, and a bit appalling to a contemporary audience with the surface submissiveness of the Maureen O’Hara character – is thoroughly engaging.

And just to remind us we’re in the macho world, we get a brilliant brawl at the end of the film. This is the man’s Harlequin romance. And while it may be a guilty pleasure, it is a pleasure nonetheless.

The Secrets (Israel 2007, 127 min dir: Avi Nesher, cast: Fanny Ardant, Ania Bukstein, Michal Shtamier)

Lots of settings for lesbian relationships, but an Israeli girls’ religious boarding school is unique. The daughter of an Hassidic scholar refuses to marry the sexless, boring pupil of her father and goes away to boarding school instead. There she meets another student who will be her lifelong friend and sexual companion.

Anouk (Fanny Ardant) is dying of some unspecified cancer and, as a school assignment; the two girls have volunteered to look in on her. She’s the driving force of the film because she offers a life view that is vibrant and intense.

The experience with Anouk becomes enlightening to the girls’ own lives, freeing them as they try to free her from her past (she went to prison for a crime of violence). Eventually she dies, and the girls discover their love for each other. When one chooses to get married, the other is overcome with grief. The fiancee, who knows about the relationship, tells them that he can live with the secret, and the bond between the girls can continue within the marriage.

Wow, this is heavy stuff for orthodox Jews. A culture that can’t even show a bare ankle is showing every emotion. The brilliance of Nesher’s film is it never departs from being human. The girls are schoolgirls. Their dates are klutzes. The scene where they double date and the guy gets up and takes the table cloth with him is as funny as any Adam Sandler movie.

Even though Fanny Ardant’s part as the dying muse looks kind of melodramatic on paper, it plays beautifully on film. And the mikvah scene (ritual bath) with the three of them naked is tasteful and natural (see clip). Too bad for the porn industry. If there was a market for Hassid Porn this scene could spawn a classic. But The Secrets is a very tasteful, emotional movie that you can have fun watching but you can’t make fun of.

The Italian (Russia 2005, 90 min, dir: Andrey Kravchuk, cast: Kolya Spiridonov, Maria Kuznetsova, Nikolai Reutov).

A six-year-old boy alone in the Russian countryside searching for his mother is not just another road movie. Vanya (Kolya Spiridonov) is an unwanted child in an Oliver Twist style Russian children’s home.

He’s slated for adoption by a nice Italian couple when he gets the notion that his mother is alive somewhere out there and would take him back if only he could find her. With the help of the other kids, he sneaks a look at his records and finds clues to where to go.

True to Dickens, the older kids in the home have long resorted to stealing and prostitution to get by. Vanya’s survival skills are well honed. He steals his records and sets off by train and by foot over a giant swath of Russian countryside on a mission to find his natural mother. Pursuing him are Madam (Maria Kuznetsova ) and Grisha (Nikolai Reutov). (Some reviews call Grisha “Gregori,” go figure). To them Vanya represents a big fat payment from the Italian couple. But the kid is crafty at braving corrupt authorities and escaping assorted dangers.

Too bad this isn’t a kid’s movie. Pampered western kids might have a few nightmares seeing what Vanya goes through, but maybe it would teach them something about life. The movie is thoroughly adult and never lets up. The amazing thing about The Italian and about Charles Dickens is 150 years hasn’t made much difference. Kids are still mistreated, still sold like commodities by unscrupulous guardians, and still thrust into the horrors of life without, food, shelter, or parenting. The subject is often covered in documentaries but Andrey Kravchuk’s film is all the more real for being drama and (we assume) fiction.

But then, Dickens wrote fiction too, and his was more real and more effective than any reformer pamphleteering of the time. The Italian is a good example of the power of fiction to be real.

Partes Usadas (Mexico 2007, 95 min. dir: Aaron Fernandez, cast: Emery Eduardo Granados, Carlos Ceja, Alan Chavez).

This is not a glamorous profession like bank robbing. All it takes to steal cars is a screwdriver and guts. The initiation of Ivan starts in a junk yard. His uncle Jaimie orders him to strip naked, then locks his shirt, pants, and underwear in different wrecked cars. He hands him a window shiv and tells him if he can jimmy the car doors open, he can get his clothes.

Every big city has a section for stolen cars. In LA it’s Bramfield Street in Pacoima. In New York it’s Willet’s Point in Flushing. In Mexico City it’s everywhere. Vast tracts of land set to one purpose: a thieves market for auto parts. Partes Usadas is about the low lifes who steal by night to fill parts orders by day.

You don’t find moments like this in Grand Theft Auto. The fascination of Partes Usadas (Used Parts) is that it looks as low life as the characters it portrays. No lovely lighting or polished dolly moves here. Even the quality of the film looks like it was outdated stock that was stolen.

At first I wanted to click “eject” because the movie has the smell of amateurism. But I got slowly hooked as I realized the lack of style was the style. Emery Eduardo Granados could be another Gael Garcia Bernal if he gets some breaks. Meanwhile Partes Usadas is a primer about what happens when your BMW disappears. Chances are if the police don’t find it in two hours there won’t be enough left to honk the horn.