International Oscars: The 10 best foreign-language films to watch before this year's ceremony
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Loading... - luke grace
- 31 Oct 2022
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It took the Oscars nearly a century to honor a non-English-language film for Best Picture (that would be Bong Joon Ho's audacious class masterpiece Parasite, in 2020). And with all the recent shuffles in format and presentation — who needs to see televised wins for Score, Editing, or Production Design, when there are Twitter polls and misdemeanor assaults to get to? — it can seem as if almost no category is safe from Academy whims. Still, like a shadow government, the nominees for Best International Feature tend to be where some of the best and most essential stuff lives: films frequently more vital, provocative, and frankly original than their main-body counterparts.
So who qualifies in 2022? Some of the rules can seem impossibly arcane: Only one production from each country may be submitted, and exceptions and asterisks abound. (Puerto Rico was eligible for decades, then suddenly not; Israel and Belgium, whose combined totals top 100 submissions, have never taken a win, while Italy has 14.) But certain titles have already emerged as favorites on the festival circuit; of the dozens of productions vying for this year's five nominations, here are 10 frontrunners of note, from a Mexican auteur's surreal autobiographical epic to a dreamy Polish picaresque about a runaway donkey.
Bardo
Helmed by Alejandro Iñárritu, a major Hollywood player who already has two Best Director prizes (for Birdman and The Revenant), Bardo can't help feeling like this year's Moby Dick. Being the biggest fish may actually work against the Mexico City native's self-refracting fever dream, along with its mondo runtime (now trimmed, after a divisive festival debut, by 22 minutes) and decidedly mixed reviews. Still, there's a lot to be said for the sheer artistic shock and awe of the film's ambitions, and the strength of its creator's engagement with Academy voters. (Nov. 4 in theaters; Dec. 16 on Netflix)
Corsage
The allure of this hallucinatory royal drama — a joint production between Austria, Germany, Luxembourg and France — can be summed up in two words: Vicky Krieps. The ethereal star of Phantom Thread and Bergman Island brings a gorgeous, restless complexity to writer-director Marie Kreutzer's sly revisionist history of Austria's Empress Elisabeth, a born nonconformist trapped in a gilded cage of duty and convention. (Dec. 23)
