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

Title: Kind Hearts and Coronets
Year: 1949
Director: Robert Hamer
Writers: Hamer and John Dighton, based on the novel “Israel Rank� by Roy Horniman
Stars: Dennis Price, Valerie Hobson, Joan Greenwood, Alec Guinness

The Story: In this blackest of black comedies, an heiress marries for love and gets disowned, but she remains obsessed with the idea that her son is 12th in line for a dukedom. After her death, the son decides that there’s nothing to be done but kill off all the family members separating him from his rightful station.

Why It’s Great: Stories of Victorian England are all about class, of course, but usually deal with those who try and fail to make their peace with the arbitrary hierarchy that pigeonholes them for life. How refreshing to finally see an ahead-of-his-time protagonist who reacts the same way we would to all this madness: with a fine murderous rage. Though he’s fourth-billed, the movie is handily stolen by Guinness, who became an instant star by playing all 8 members of the same family that get killed off by Price. Though you would expect him to camp it up, he instead invests each of these inbred lords and ladies with enough dignity to pull against the satire and give the movie some strong moral tension.

More at Cockeyed Caravan!

Where God Left His Shoes (USA, 2007, 96 min. dir: Salvatore Stabile, cast: John Leguizamo, Leonor Varepa, David Castro, Samantha M. Rose)

In the list of Christmas movies, few end badly. The most popular ever, It’s a Wonderful Life, manages to pull joy from despair in the last reel. But Where God Left His Shoes doesn’t have an uncle Billy to arrive with a basket of money and save the day.

Frank (John Leguizamo) is a down on his luck boxer who finds himself homeless along with his wife and two children. Together they range through a gulag of homeless shelters and welfare centers across New York City while Frank hunts for the elusive job that will qualify his family for subsidized housing. Angela (Leonor Varepa) is his long enduring wife who tries to manage the two kids and bed them down among bums and crazies in bed bugged dormitories.

How do you teach your son values when the world around you has ceased to value you? What do you do when there is no place to sleep? How can you make your pleas heard in a system where everyone else is pleading too?

Frank tells son Justin (David Castro) they are the forgotten. The title refers to the fact that they have been forsaken even by God. He does not dwell in the places they do. You won’t find him leaving his shoes there when he beds down for the night.

This is not a perfect film, and critics have torn it apart for plot problems. The lack of a happy ending also goes against the traditional Christmas movie. We don’t want to be depressed on Christmas any more than we wanted to be depressed on Thanksgiving when Edward R. Murrow presented Harvest of Shame on CBS network, on Thanksgiving weekend 1960.

The Murrow doc followed migrant field workers toiling in the land of plenty and suffering poverty and hopelessness. Like Where God Left His Shoes, Harvest of Shame tried to raise a little indigestion in the stomachs of a nation filled with turkey and stuffing.

The effect of both films has been limited. Harvest of Shame got all the awards but nothing changed for the migrants. Where God Left His Shoes was slammed by the critics, seen by few, and never credited for social issues it raised and the people it profiled.

But its story and subject deserve greater attention. This is also one of the small but growing list of films about the outer boroughs of New York City. Far from the LED lights of Times Square, this is the New York where most of the City’s 20 million people actually live (see also Paraiso Travel on MovieWithMe.com).

Storm ( Germany 2009, 105 min. dir: Hans-Christian Schmid, cast: Kerry Fox (Hannah), Anamaria Marinca (Mira), Stephen Dillane, Rolf Lassgard)

What do Sudan, Israel and the United States all have in common? They are the only three countries in the world not members of the International Criminal Court. Next question: what is the International Criminal Court?

It is a UN sponsored investigative and judicial system headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and charged with judging crimes against humanity such as genocide. It gets tricky for a country like the US and Israel that build Holocaust museums and where Jews urge “Never Forget.” They won’t join because they might be prosecuted for trifles like Guantanamo and Gaza. Sudan can be excused because no one there probably knows what a court is anyway.

The brilliance of Storm is in using the International Criminal Court as the setting for a first rate murder mystery. Hannah (Kerry Fox) is a prosecutor sent from ICC in The Hague to try a former Serbian commander accused of genocide. She manages to ferret out the real truth about the crime only to see European Union politics present a barrier to justice.

Though Storm is a German production, the language is English, and the narrative resembles some of the best of courtroom/mystery dramas. It’s intelligent and suspenseful. More over it is original in trying to examine how the ICC works, and how politics can derail the highest of motives.

Most Americans don’t know there is an ICC, or that is has the power to try politicians like Slobodan Milosevic. Or that the UN maintains a secure prison in The Hague where sentences are served. The UN attempt at international justice is far from American shores because we refuse to support it. The irony of the US refusing to support justice for all because it would mean justice for us too, is a further reason to see and consider the story told in Storm. Who amongst our politicians or generals might be in the defendant box?

King of Thieves (Czech Republic 2004, 101 min, dir: Ivan Fila. cast: Lazar Ristovski, Yasha Kultiasov, Oktay Ozdemir, Katharina Thalbach, Julia Khanverdieva)

Mixing romanticism and misery was always been a specialty of Eastern Europe. The excuse was grimness enforced by Communism. The Communists are long gone but the filmmaking conventions persist.

Jan Sverak, who directed Koyla, is a leading proponent. Ivan Fila, who directed King of Thieves and Lea before, is an eager student. Both films are about children who undergo traumatic experiences as they experience the injustices of the world.

Barbu (Yasha Kultiasov) and his older sister Mimma (Julia Khanverdieva), children of a Ukrainian peasant, are sold to a traveling circus promoter for a better life in Berlin. The girl is forced into prostitution and the boy is trained to be a pickpocket. Caruso (Lazar Ristovski) is the ringmaster overseeing it all.

He’s a mixture of charm, magic, and brutality that is counterbalanced by his drug-addicted girlfriend Julie (Katharina Thalbach) and Marcel (Oktay Ozdemir), the boy who befriends Barbu and tutors him in the art of thievery.

What keeps this pudding together is Caruso’s swings form demonic to delightful. One moment he is whipping the boys and threatening them if they don’t go out and get more money. The next he is doing magic tricks and taking Barbu to the circus.

The photography is by Vladimir Smutny, a seasoned pro with colored gels. He’s from the paint with light school of Eastern Europeans who are time-warp practitioners; throwbacks to when Hollywood cinematographers also believed that a shadow was something without value unless you bathed it in color. The effect heightens the romantic feeling of a film whose plot is pretty grim.

But the combination of grimness and romanticism is the reason King of Thieves stands out and is worth a look. The other curious reason to have a look is the production shut down in the middle for lack of money. It was re-started two years later. Two years is a long time for two rapidly growing kids. Interesting to watch Barbu and Mimma as they take a jump in size and maturity not entirely due to their new professions as a whore and a thief.