100 Most Popular Foreign Films of 2018 + the Oscar Hopefuls!

Our year in review party begins TODAY. A different list each day! Here's Nathaniel R...

Time for an annual look back at subtitled fare in cinemas. As with 2017 and the year before India, China, Mexico, and South Korea dominate with a smattering of Oscar contenders and random other countries faring much less well in the American marketplace. Much of the imbalance is due to dedicated distributors who saw a underserved market and focus specifically on it. Here in Manhattan, it's interesting to watch how this plays out. Generally speaking some big multiplexes reserve one or two screens for super specific distributors (Bollywood and mainstream Asian features for example are often at the Empire in Times Square which has 25 screens). Meanwhile the traditional "arthouse theaters" continue to rely on the decades-long practice of programming festival hits, docs, and arthouse style cinema which leans heavily European with a few buzzy Asian titles thrown in; in other words they're Oscar-aligned in their tastes.

For the purposes of the following list we skipped documentaries and animated films to keep the list more focused (and avoid arguments about dubbed versions or whatnot). The numbers are pulled from Box Office Mojo.

TOP 100 FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILMS FOR 2018
Domestic Box Office Grosses Only - Figures as of March 2nd, 2019

The $1 Million Plus Club
(The Success Stories) 

01 Padmaavat $11.8 (India) Jan 25th
This lux nearly 3 hour medieval epic is about an ambitious Sultan who becomes obsessed with a beautiful Queen. Available to stream on Amazon Prime.

02 Sanju $7.9 (India) June 29th
Biopic of a famous controversial actor. Available to stream on Netflix.

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Blueprints: "A Fantastic Woman"

To celebrate Pride Month, every week of June Jorge has been highlighting the script of a movie that focuses on a different letter of the LGBT acronym. For “T”, the last installment in this miniseries, he looks at the most recent Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film.

The LGBT experience encompasses all types of people, genders, nationalities, economic statuses, and every intersectionality in between. It doesn’t look one single way, and it certainly doesn’t feel like one, either. As the canon of queer cinema being to expand beyond one or two points of view, the ways in which film reflects this experience starts to get as diverse and colorful as the community itself.

So let’s take a look at A Fantastic Woman, the Oscar-winning Chilean film about a trans woman dealing with the loss of her partner, and the overwhelming grief and pressure that come with it. While it is a sobering portrait of a trans experience, it also effectively uses surreal imagery to portray the particular moments that Marina is going through. Let’s dive into two of them. 

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Mixed Media: "A Fantastic Woman" Dreams an Awakening

by Ilich Mejía

Arguably the only drawback of watching a movie on the literal big screen is not being able to immediately rewind to catch a perfect moment again. Well, maybe you could if you were friends with the theater's staff, but some of us may have pissed off too many of those by asking them to turn the air conditioning up a few too many times. In Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman, last year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, that perfect moment comes an hour into the film when its protagonist Marina (played by Daniela Vega, the trans actress that inspired the film) finds herself in a underground club hiding from the slew of problems the death of her partner has earned her. There, Lelio and his team use dance and music to have Marina confront the movie’s major themes of loss and acceptance in a way that shocks her as much as it moves the audience.

Shiny fringe and mild spoilers after the cut...

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And the Links Go To...

Team Experience has been sharing favorite moments from Oscar night  but we must slowly ween ourselves off of Oscar (*sniffle*) and back to the new year in progress. Link time! 

• Vulture The Oscars should always be long (I love this piece with all my heart)
• Liza Donnelly her collection of live drawings from Oscar week

Miscellaneous Screen
• Indie Wire how fun is this? A theater in San Francisco is hosting a screening of Isle of Dogs in which moviegoers can bring their dogs into the theater!
• Deadline apparently there are competing projects about Sharon Tate and the Manson murders. Tate's surviving families are supporting a version starring Kate Bosworth and they're upset with the other two projects (one of which is Quentin Tarantino's)
• AV Club hilarious story -- a teen broke her retainer biting down on it while thirsting for Michael B Jordan in Black Panther. He's now offered to buy her a new one
• MNPP Jason reminds us that David Robert Mitchell (of It Follows promise) has a new movie coming out starring Andrew Garfield
• The Muse how many more non-hits can Jennifer Lawrence's career withstand?
• Straight Outta Crouch End A fascinating take on A Fantastic Woman and its references to Orpheus and Eurydice.

Off Screen
• Vox on MoviePass's fuzzy business model
• Slate Russell Crowe holding a "divorce auction". Do the items paint a "strange and mesmerizing portrait"?
• Out Actress Cynthia Nixon is laying the groundwork to run for Governor in NY
• TodayTix "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" on Broadway has $40 lottery tickets -regular seats are hundreds of dollars so competition will be fierce. Friday morning entry only!
• NYT "The Shed," a newperformance space in Manhattan is looking to mash art-forms up from film directors staging concerts to collaborations between actors, poets, and opera stars? Sounds exciting.

The Oscars were gay and Latino, just like I am

by Jorge Molina

A couple of months ago I wrote a piece for this site about feeling seen, in a way I hadn't before, onscreen. Coco and Call Me by Your Name perfectly captured two different parts of my identity. Fast forward to Sunday’s 90th Academy Awards. Both of those movies deservedly won statues. More surprisingly a never ending parade of queer and Latino moments made me feel, yet again, that someone like myself has a place in the biggest stage in the world...

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