Browse Movies : 2003 : Foreign

When her majesty's crown jewels are stolen by a conniving Frenchman (John Malkovich), who also plans to steal the queen's throne, Johnny English (Rowan Atkinson), a bit unseasoned but intensely enthusiastic, is thrown onto the case. Fast cars, high tech gadgets, top secret info - Johnny can hardly believe it. He may be in over his head, but his courage and dedication are unmatched - especially after he meets double agent Lorna Campbell (Natalie Imbruglia) and discovers that falling in love makes saving the nation even more exciting.

Rising young artist Angelique (Audrey Tautou) lives in a candy-colored fantasy world. From the moment she flashes her smile and persuades a flower shop owner to deliver a surprise single rose to her lover Loic (Samuel Le Bihan), the world has – again – fallen under her spell. In the glorious throes of true love, Angelique is happily planning her future: a career as a painter and a future with Loic… what more could she desire? But things are rarely as they seem and Loic, a married cardiologist, has a slightly more jaded take on their affair…

Set during the final days of the war between Iran and Iraq, this is the story of an elderly Iranian Kurd musician who ventures off with his two sons, also musicians, into the dangerous territory of Kurdish Iraq in search of his wife, Hanareh, a singer with an amazing voice, who they fear may be in danger there, after she ran away with the old man's best friend.

This is the story of how a washed-up 1980s pop star (Craig Ferguson) gets a chance at a new direction in his life when he discovers that he has a teenage daughter, Olivia (Charlotte Church), in Cardiff, Wales (her real-life hometown) as the result of a weekend affair he had back at the height of his fame, especially when she decides she wants to follow him with a musical career of her own, against the wishes of her mother (Jemma Redgrave).

Shortly after both his brother died and his girlfriend left him, Bruce (Rodolphe Marconi), a young filmmaker attending a year-long seminar in Rome, finds himself becoming the subject of obssession by a mostly straight Italian tour guide, Matteo (Andrea Necci), after the two end up sleeping together. Matteo continues to hang around Bruce, sometimes lurking in the darkness, stalking him, even as a new American girl (Echo Danon) with a fascination with serial killers enters their lives.

Takeshi Kaneshiro stars in this thriller as Miyamoto, an assassin who accidentally wounds a young woman during a shoot out. When Miyamoto goes to help her, she tells him that she has been sent from the future to prevent an alien invasion that will occur in 72 hours. She informs him that because he has injured her, he must now help her carry out her mission or else be responsible for the destruction of humanity.

Set in an unnamed country in a post-apocalyptic future, this is the story of a young female assassin, Yuki (Yumiko Shaku), who discovers that the leader of the band of outlaws she belongs to murdered her mother. Finding herself targeted for elimination after she confronts the group's leader about her mother's death, Yuki goes on the run from her former coworkers. Barely surviving an attack, she finds refuge with a young man who used to be a terrorist, with whom she gradually falls in love, but with trained killers getting closer and closer to finding her, can their love survive?

A young Frenchman moves into an apartment full of international students in Barcelona and discovers that mixing with students of many nationalities gives him a new perspective on life.

At a deserted train station, a teacher and a gangster meet and realize that each might have been better suited to the other man's way of life. As a friendship of sorts develops between these opposite personalities, each starts to envy the other and by the week's end, everything will change for both of them.

A love story spanning two continents, "Nowhere in Africa" is the extraordinary true tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany, Walter Redlich, his wife Jettel (Juliane Kohler) and their five-year-old daughter Regina each deal with the harsh realities of their new life in different ways. Attorney Walter is resigned to working the farm as a caretaker; pampered Jettel resists adjustment at every turn; while the shy yet curious Regina immediately embraces the country-learning the local language and customs, and finding a friend in Owuor, the farm's cook. As the war rages on the other side of the world, the trio's relationships to their strange environment become increasingly complicated as Jettel grows more self-assured and Walter more haunted by the life they left behind. As they eventually learn to cherish their life in Africa, they also endeavor to find a way back to each other.

Set in a small Edo period Japanese brothel near Tokyo, this is the story of a young samurai, Fusanosuke (Hidetaka Yoshioka), who seeks refuge there in the company of a young prostitute, Oshin (Nagiko Tono), after he accidentally wounded a powerful samurai during an argument whose colleagues are now seeking to kill Fusanosuke in return. Soon falling in love with Oshin, Fusanosuke hopes to be able to cleanse her from the sins of her occupation so that she may be his wife, even as danger lurks all around the brothel.

After accidentally causing the death of her mother (Mariella Valentini), a young lesbian, Lenni (Regina Orioli), runs away with her auto mechanic girlfriend, Stella (Maya Sansa), with the mom's body in the trunk of their car and a gang of crazies on their tail.

Legendary criminal. Proud homosexual. Cabaret star. Passionate lover. Killer. Devoted father of seven adopted children. Saint or devil? Madame Satã. Born to slaves in the arid wasteland of Northern Brazil and sold by his mother at the age of 7, he pursued his freedom on the mean streets of Lapa, Rio de Janeiro. Jet-black, six feet tall, 180 pounds of proud muscle in a silk shirt and tight pants, a cutthroat razor in his back pocket. Karim Aïnouz's extraordinary portrait of the triumphs and tragedy of this explosive and paradoxical personality unfolds against the vibrant, sordid background of Lapa: thronging underworld of pimps and whores, of cut-throats, queers and artists, of dark bars and brothels thick with smoke, drenched in sweat and cheap perfume. A world run through with violence and raw desire, where desperate dreams spring from poverty and squalor.

Adopted by his grandmother, Madame Souza, Champion is a lonely little boy. Noticing that this lad is never happier than on a bicycle, Madame Souza puts him through a rigorous training process. Years go by and Champion becomes worthy of his name. Now his ready to enter the world-famous cycling race, the Tour de France. However during this cycling contest two mysterious men in black kidnap Champion. Madame Souza and her faithful dog Bruno set out to rescue him. Their quest takes them across the ocean to a giant Megalopolis called Belleville where they encounter the renowned "Triplets of Belleville", three eccentric female music-hall stars from the 30's who decide to take Madame Souza and Bruno under their wing. Thanks to Bruno's brilliant sense of smell, the brave duo are soon on to Champion's trail. But will they succeed in beating the devilish plans of the evil French mafia?

The 1970s was an extraordinary time of rebellion, of questioning every accepted idea: political activism, hedonism, protests, the sexual revolution, the women's movement, the civil rights movement, the music revolution, rage and liberation. Every standard by which we set our social and cultural clocks was either turned inside out or thrown away completely and reinvented. For American cinema, the 1970s was an era during which a new generation of filmmakers created work for a new kind of audience--moviegoers who were hungry for stories that reflected their own experiences and who were turning their backs on aged old studio formulas. As a result, emerging filmmakers influenced by foreign directors such as Godard, Kurasowa and Fellini coupled with the social climate and a struggling studio system, converged to create a new kind of moviemaking. Through their choice of material, filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Peter Bogdonovich, William Friedkin, Roger Corman and Paul Schrader revolutionized mainstream movies and for the first time personal visions were coming out of the studio system.

Newly commissioned SS Lieutenant and respected civilian chemist, Kurt Gerstein, discovers that the Zyklon B pellets he has developed to disinfect soldiers' drinking water are being used to gas interred Jews by the thousands. Recruited to help streamline the death camp process by a team of SS officers, Gerstein secretly approaches the Swedish Consulate, the German Protestant community and finally Vatican representatives in the hopes of exposing this unspeakable crime. The only one who listens is Father Ricardo, a young Jesuit priest with deep family connections at the Vatican. Ricardo promises Gerstein he will alert the Pope to the Jewish genocide in hopes that the pontiff will reveal and denounce the Final Solution to the Christian world...

Set in Toronto, a romantic tale which revolves around Rahul Seth, a Westernized, young dot.com millionaire, and his unconventional relationship with the beautiful and wild Sue Singh. Rahul is devastated after the untimely death of his beautiful, pop artist, blonde girlfriend Kimberly. To make matters worse, he is under extreme pressure from his family to get engaged to a good Hindu girl before his sister's upcoming wedding. Lest one forgets, according to the popular Hindu adage, 'the best cure for a broken heart is marriage'. Desperate, he hires the services of the gorgeous Sue, a local escort girl, to pretend to be his fiancée during the ten days of celebration, leading up to his sister's marriage ceremony. While Rahul is the scion of a typically successful NRI family, Sue is the daughter of a humble car mechanic and--professionally speaking--is one of the highest paid escorts in Toronto. They enter into the relationship as opposites. However, during this fateful period of much song, dance and merriment, Rahul and Sue's relationship slowly transcends that of employer and employee. With her passion for life, Sue manages to break through Rahul's hardened exterior to reveal a sensitive man who is not as emotionally dead as he would like to believe. In turn, Rahul's strong personality and advice enables Sue to see her parents in a more positive light.

This documentary captures what happened in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on June 12th, 2000 when Bus 174 was highjacked by an armed young man, Sandro do Nascimento, with a dozen passengers. Nascimento threatened to kill all of the passengers, but eventuallly agreed to surrender, as TV cameras were rolling and an entire nation was glued to their screens watching the event take place. Then, a police officer decided to fire at Nascimento anyway, accidentally killing one of the female passengers instead. What followed was a revolt among the city's population, enraged at police brutality. The film intertwines the story of the standoff with biographical information about Sandro do Nascimento, including his childhood as a survivor of the "Candelaria" child mass murders in the early 1990s, and the trauma of seeing his mother stabbed to death in front of him.

After it is killed in a bullfight, a bull's body parts are transported across Europe, in Spain, France, Italy and Belgium, with this ensemble drama showing us the people who are the recipients of the remains in one way or another, like an Italian actress (Chiara Mastroianni) selling the bones in a supermarket promotion, a Spanish woman (Angela Molina) who dines on its steaks, a little girl (Raphaelle Molinier) in northern France who imagines a world where animals are much larger than humans, and a taxidermist (Jacques Gamblin) whose wife is simultaneously giving birth to quintuplets.

This is the true story of how a Japanese businessman from Los Angeles, Eishy Hayata, built an emerald mining empire in Columbia that is today one of the world's largest and most powerful, starting in the 1970s as an "esmeraldero", an emerald buyer who goes directly to rural areas where emeralds can be procured from locals at bargain prices in their rough form. Central to the film's intrigue are Columbia's more brutal realities, as guerrilla warfare and street kidnappings are quite common. To combat this, Hayata fashions himself as a sort of modern cowboy, armed and dressed to fit the bill, along with a powerful cadre of personal bodyguards.