7
Wracked with guilt after unjustly punishing her daughter Linda, widowed mother Paulette resolves to do anything to make it up to her. What does the girl want? A meal of chicken with peppers, which reminds her of the dish her father used to make. But with a general strike closing stores all across town and pushing people into the streets, this innocent request quickly leads to an outrageous series of events that spirals out of control, as Paulette does everything she can to keep her promise and find a chicken for Linda. Directors Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach unleash a unique visual marvel of hand-painted animation with bright, color-blocked characters, and a story that blends slapstick comedy, musical, and family drama, as Paulette and Linda ultimately confront the grief of an unspoken tragedy through the meal that could finally bring them closer together.
7.6
In this moving first-person documentary, a young filmmaker delves into her mother and grandmother’s complicated pasts and her own fractured Iranian identity. Having grown up in rural Vermont, far removed from the homeland of her mother, Mitra, and grandmother, Behjat, Sierra Urich knew of Iran only through family stories, food, and holidays. Seeking to make sense of her heritage, she turns to Mitra and Behjat to construct a probing and sometimes disarmingly funny history of three generations of women and their complex relationship to an Iran of the past. Interrogating family history and memory, including her grandmother’s experiences as a preteen bride and her mother’s rebellious teenage years during the Iranian Revolution, Urich crafts a rich, personal family portrait that poignantly reflects the diasporic experience.
7.3
Death is only the beginning in this fantastically phantasmagoric animated odyssey, which imagines heaven in the boldly colorful, psychedelic style of George Dunning’s Beatles classic YELLOW SUBMARINE. Having just arrived in paradise, the recently deceased Jerome finds himself adrift in a surreally blissed-out wonderland as he searches for his late wife Maryline. But is there love after death?
7.1
An epic fantasy adventure set in a world of ancient gods, CHILDREN WHO CHASE LOST VOICES follows Asuna, an introvert who spends her time listening to a radio that belonged to her deceased father. One day, she hears an odd song that resonates in her heart unlike anything else. It leads to a chance encounter with a mysterious boy, who transports Asuna to Agarthaa, land of legend where the dead can be brought back to life. Compelled by the song and the boy, Asuna journeys through the mythical lands, but hostile warriors and ghastly creatures will stop at nothing to prevent Asuna from uncovering the secrets of their world.
5.8
Keatonesque slapstick meets woman-on-the-edge psychodrama in this singular, tonally audacious exploration of modern motherhood, performance, and identity. Displaying a brilliance for both physical comedy and Cindy Sherman–esque transformation, Shannon Plumb writes, directs, and stars as Penelope, a Brooklyn mother of two who struggles to traverse the daily obstacle course that is motherhood with little help from her filmmaker husband (played by Plumb’s real-life filmmaker husband Derek Cianfrance). In a desperate quest to assert her own artistic voice, Penelope begins inhabiting a series of outlandish characters and alternate identities in an existential journey that’s by turns antically funny and unsettling.
7
Eight-year-old Hawa is reunited with her African refugee mother after six years apart—and now finds herself living with a woman in the midst of a deep mental-health crisis.
7.9
The lyrical, profoundly moving STILL WALKING (ARUITEMO ARUITEMO) is contemporary Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda's most personal work to date. Created as a tribute to his late mother, the film depicts one day in the life of the Yokoyamas, gathered together for a commemorative ritual whose nature only gradually becomes clear. Rather than focus on big dramatic moments, Kore-eda relies on simple gestures and domestic routines (especially cooking) to evoke a family’s entire life, its deep regrets and its daily joys. Featuring vivid, heartrending performances and a gentle naturalism that harks back to the director’s earlier, documentary work, STILL WALKING is an extraordinary portrayal of the ties that bind us.
7.6
Jafar Panahi’s revelatory debut feature is a child’s-eye adventure in which a young girl’s quest to buy a goldfish leads her on a detour-filled journey through the streets of Tehran on the eve of the Iranian New Year celebration. Cowritten by Panahi with his mentor Abbas Kiarostami, this beguiling, prizewinning fable unfolds in documentary-like real time as it wrings unexpected comedy, suspense, and wonder from its seemingly simple premise.
8.1
The first film in Abbas Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing KOKER TRILOGY takes a simple premise—a boy searches for the home of his classmate, whose school notebook he has accidentally taken—and transforms it into a miraculous, child’s-eye adventure of the everyday. As our young hero zigzags determinedly across two towns, aided (and sometimes misdirected) by those he encounters, his quest becomes both a revealing portrait of rural Iranian society in all its richness and complexity and a touching parable about the meaning of personal responsibility. Sensitive and profound, WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE? is shot through with all the beauty, tension, and wonder a single day can contain.
6.6
This simple moral tale seems to prefigure WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE? Two young schoolboys, Dara and Nader, are friends until Dara returns Nader’s notebook torn and Nader retaliates in kind, setting off an escalating battle that leads to destruction of property and physical injury. In the second solution, Dara realizes his offense and repairs the notebook, preserving the peace and the friendship. The film is shot mostly in close-ups, with a narrator drolly chronicling the action.
7.4
An elderly painter whose son visits with his family on the weekends, is also surprised by a visit from his still-single daughter.
5.9
The first of Abbas Kiarostami’s films made for, rather than about, children was an experiment in combining live action and animation, done in collaboration with animator Nafiseh Riahi. As two schoolboys watch animated views of animals’ actions—kangaroos jumping, fish swimming, etc.—one boy (played by Riahi’s son Kamal) says, “I can, too,” and imitates the actions. The music is sprightly, the mood fun. The second boy is Kiarostami’s son Ahmad.
7.9
The second film Satyajit Ray made about the Sherlock Holmes-like detective Feluda—a character the filmmaker originated in a popular series of novels—is a cleverly entertaining mystery set in the holy city of Varanasi. It’s there that the celebrated sleuth (Soumitra Chatterjee) and his assistant Topshe (Siddhartha Chatterjee) find their vacation interrupted by the disappearance of a priceless statue—leading to a twisty investigation involving a host of colorful characters and surprising reveals.
5.4
Robert Altman brought his exuberantly chaotic experimental sensibility to this live-action version of the classic comic strip, featuring spot-on performances by Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall as the titular brawny sailorman and his lithe lady love, Olive Oyl, as well as seamlessly integrated songs by Harry Nilsson. Though its kooky brilliance went largely unappreciated upon its release, time has revealed this wonderfully weird, charmingly imaginative comic fantasy to be quintessential Altman.
7.3
In this charming Czechoslovak fantasy, irrepressible teenage witch Saxana (Petra Černocká)—facing three hundred years of detention at her sorcery academy—casts a spell that transports her to the human world where she joins up with a band of delinquents and uses her magic to spread mischief at their school—including turning the teachers to rabbits! One of a string of beloved fairy-tale comedies directed by Václav Vorlíček (WHO WANTS TO KILL JESSIE?), THE GIRL ON THE BROOMSTICK bursts with whimsical special effects and a sense of pure play.
6.6
Graced with the same intelligence and sensitivity that has defined her acting work, Jodie Foster’s highly assured directorial debut explores, with immense poignancy and humor, a subject near to her own life: the experiences of gifted children navigating a world that often fails to understand them. She stars as Dede Tate, a single mother struggling to provide the intellectual stimulation that her son Fred (Adam Hann-Byrd)—a child prodigy who displays remarkable skills in math, music, and art—seems to need. When Jane Grierson (Dianne Wiest), a child psychologist and herself a former child prodigy, takes Fred under her wing, the boy finds himself caught between a life of the mind and his chance for a “normal” childhood.
6.9
In this fantastic voyage through time and space from Terry Gilliam, a boy named Kevin (Craig Warnock) escapes his gadget-obsessed parents to join a band of time-traveling dwarfs. Armed with a map stolen from the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson), they plunder treasure from Napoleon (Ian Holm) and Agamemnon (Sean Connery)--but the Evil Genius (David Warner) is watching their every move. Featuring a darkly playful script by Gilliam and his Monty Python cohort Michael Palin (who also appears in the film), TIME BANDITS is at once a giddy fairy tale, a revisionist history lesson, and a satire of technology gone awry.
7
“The mother of all my films,” according to Abbas Kiarostami, starts out as a breezily observed anecdote about a boy wending his way home through Tehran alleys carrying a loaf of bread. Variations on both the boy and the old man he sees and begins to follow will factor into future Kiarostami films, as will the use of “dead time,” the journey structure, and the poetic articulation of space. The final scene, involving a dog and a door, ends things on a note of wry ambiguity.
6.2
Disciplined at school for breaking a window, a boy joins throngs of his schoolmates as they make a cacophonous exit into Tehran’s streets. He then briefly joins an impromptu soccer game but disrupts it by stealing the ball and running away, and ends up drifting aimlessly along a busy highway. Free of dialogue but using nonsynchronous concrete sound throughout, this moody film shows Abbas Kiarostami expanding his visual vocabulary with zooms and crane and helicopter shots.
7.6
This enchanting Czech Christmas classic has become a Central European yuletide staple thanks to its perennial presence on television each holiday season. A charming, spirited twist on the classic fairy tale, THREE WISHES FOR CINDERELLA updates the beloved story with a picturesque, woodsy wintertime setting and a refreshingly sharp-witted, assertive heroine (Libuše Šafránková), a housemaid who uses her wits and many talents—along with a bit of help from some magical hazelnuts—to win her prince and find her happily ever after.
6.6
Two little girls explore their views on marriage, death, babies, and love in this gently poignant, Academy Award–nominated idyll suffused with the offhanded wisdom of childhood.
5.2
In director Jun Fukuda’s second Godzilla outing, secret weather-control experiments create a radioactive storm and Godzilla must rescue monster hatchling Minilla from the giant mutant insects that result. Featuring a buoyant score by Masaru Sato and impressive wirework by special-effects director Sadamasa Arikawa, Son of Godzilla is lively, comic, and timely in its addressing of contemporary anxiety about worldwide food shortages.
7.8
A lighthearted take on director Yasujiro Ozu’s perennial theme of the challenges of intergenerational relationships, GOOD MORNING tells the story of two young boys who stop speaking in protest after their parents refuse to buy a television set. Ozu weaves a wealth of subtle gags through a family portrait as rich as those of his dramatic films, mocking the foibles of the adult world through the eyes of his child protagonists. Shot in stunning color and set in a suburb of Tokyo where housewives gossip about the neighbors’ new washing machine and unemployed husbands look for work as door-to-door salesmen, this charming comedy refashions Ozu’s own silent classic I WAS BORN, BUT . . . to gently satirize consumerism in postwar Japan.
8.1
Rarely has the spirit of childhood been evoked as exquisitely as in this Academy Award–winning cinematic fable, a fantasy with the texture of reality. On the streets of 1950s Paris, a young boy (played by director Albert Lamorisse’s son, Pascal) is launched on a miraculous adventure when he’s playfully pursued by a shiny red balloon that seems to have a mind of its own—until the harsh realities of the world interfere, setting the stage for a deeply moving finale. Shot in beautifully muted Technicolor, this beguiling allegory of innocence and transcendence has inspired generations of viewers to let their imaginations take flight.
