My list of the year’s best foreign films contains 15 titles. Why? Because that’s how many I put on the list. Five others were on my earlier lists. Altogether now, adding my lists of documentaries and animated films, I have 50 “best films.” Does that mean I’m getting soft? No, it means I reviewed 284 films in 2009, and these 17% were the best. – Roger Ebert

To read Roger Ebert’s full article, go here

Here’s the full-list nominees for 2010 BAFTA for the BEST FILM category:

Avatar

District 9

An Education

Gran Torino

The Hurt Locker

Inglourious Basterds

Invictus

Moon

Precious

The Road

A Serious Man

A Single Man

Star Trek

Up

Up In The Air

DIRECTOR
AVATAR – James Cameron
DISTRICT 9 – Neill Blomkamp
AN EDUCATION – Lone Scherfig
THE HURT LOCKER – Kathryn Bigelow
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS – Quentin Tarantino

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
THE HANGOVER – Jon Lucas, Scott Moore
THE HURT LOCKER – Mark Boal
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS – Quentin Tarantino
A SERIOUS MAN – Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
UP – Pete Docter, Bob Peterson

OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM

An Education

Fish Tank

In The Loop

Moon

Nowhere Boy

FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Los Abrazos Rotos

Coco Avant Chanel

Låt Den Rätte Komma In

Un Prophète

Das Weiße Band

ANIMATED FILM

Coraline

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Up

Winners will be crowned on Feb. 21st.

The Film Festival Locarno known as Festival del film Locarno is an international film festival held annually in the city of Locarno, Switzerland since 1946. The top prize is the Golden Leopard awarded to the best film in the international competition.
Congratulations to Ho Yuhang for his film Sham Moh was selected to compete in this year festival. Malaysia Boleh! This year’s festival run from 5-15.08.2009.

There are 19 films to compete for the Golden Leopard they are:

A Religiosa Portuguesa

Director:
Eugène Green
Writer:
Eugène Green (screenplay)

Plot
A young French actress in Lisbon to shoot a movie is intrigued by a nun she sees kneeling in the chapel where she is filming.

Akadimia Platonso

Director:
Fillipos Tsitos
Writer:
Alexis Kardaras (writer)

Plot
A Greek shopkeeper discovers something about his family’s past when his mother embraces an Albanian worker.

Au Voleur

Director:
Sarah Petit
Writers:
Emmanuelle Jacob & Sarah Petit (screenplay)

Plot
An unlikely relationship goes deeper between a petty criminal with a young teacher when they run to forest trying to avoid the law.

Buben, Baraban

Director:
Aleksei Mizgiryov
Writer:
Aleksei Mizgiryov (screenplay)

Plot
Follow the story of Yekaterina Artemovna (Natalia Negoda), set in late 1990s Russia, where she struggles as best as she can to improve her own life despite many challenges she faces throughout the hard time.

Complices

Director:
Frédéric Mermoud
Writers:
Pascal Arnold (writer)
Frédéric Mermoud (writer)

Plot
Crime story investigating the murder and the disappearance of two teenagers, both are prostitutes and the case’s impact to it’s investigators.

Frontier Blues

Director:
Babak Jalali
Writer:
Babak Jalali (written by)

Plot
A touching and amusing story about four men in Gorgan, dealing with their everyday life. Life for these four individuals passes slowly, lulled by a daily routine in which hope has almost entirely disappeared, even though the odd glimmer might appear.

…to be continued

What’s New In Independent and Foreign Film Releases

August 7

August 14

August 17

August 21

August 28

This is the film which started my films collections. The first pirated movie VCD ever that I bought back in 2000 but only managed to watched it once throughout the times. Last night was my second time after decided to buy its DVD copy. My first experience with the movie didn’t going quiet well. After watched it for the first time in 2000, I thought the movie was so overrated. I didn’t know why people love this film so much, the critics love this film so much, even IMDb listed this between no. 20 in their 250 greatest films ever.
So as a starter for this blog, I decided to watched this film again with the intention to try to re-evaluate my first thought about it. Unfortunately, my second experience bring me the ‘usual suspect’. OVERRATED. I agreed that the film has the clever film ending with the surprise element but not the greatest one, and the second time viewing make it worse when I didn’t feel the surprise anymore. Not to mention the slow development of the story and the characters.
There’s nothing more to write about this film except its great screenplay (won Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen at the Oscar and BAFTA 1996) and the performance of the ensemble casts especially Kevin Spacey and yes the directorial of Bryan Singer who’s at the time was merely 20’s something. This is the film which put them both on the map.
To prevent any spoilers, I stop here but I do recommend you to watch this film by yourself and make you own judgment to my ‘usual suspect’.

Police investigating an exploded boat on a San Pedro pier discover 27 bodies and $91 million worth of drug money. The only survivors are a severely burned and very scared Hungarian terrorist and Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey), a crippled con-man. Reluctantly, Kint is pressured into explaining exactly what happened on the boat. His story begins six weeks earlier with five criminals being dragged in by New York police desperate for suspects on a hijacked truck and ends with the possible identification of a criminal mastermind.

I valued this movie as $7 from $11 worth of movie ticket.