My Award Nominations: Best Foreign Film

Oscar voting closes today, and believe it or not, there are still some nominees that haven't even been made available for public consumption. One of them is Argentinian foreign language film hopeful Wild Tales, which you won't find on my own Best Foreign Film ballot for the obvious reason that I haven't seen it yet.

On that note, I'll remind you of the three-word caveat that always accompanies my own choices for this category every single year: "Subject to change". I am often forced to amend and improve my five nominees up to several months (sometimes years) after the fact because there's so much good world cinema out there and so little of it gets released in North America in a timely fashion. Among the buzziest international titles from 2014 that I still have to see are the aforementioned Wild Tales (which I may be able to catch just before the Oscars), Godard's Farewell to Language, and Hungarian festival sensation White God.

That being said, even if those or any other subtitled latecomers never make it to my screen, I'd still feel adequately satisfied with these five terrific films.

Review - Force Majeure

If you and your family were faced with a life-threatening situation, how would you react? Would you put yourself in harm's way to protect your loved ones, or would your self-preservation reflexes compel you to flee?

Obviously, the more valorous answer is the one you would give to anyone who asks, but the truth is we never really know which instinct will rule our actions until we're actually faced with a real force majeure. That legalese term for an extraordinary or dangerous circumstance is also the title of Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund's new dramedy, which probes this hypothetical for some revelations as slippery as a double black diamond ski run.

Östlund sets the scene at a luxury resort in the French Alps, where we meet a seemingly idyllic family: Tomas, Ebba, and their kids Harry & Vera. And yet Östlund suggests that they're not nearly as solid as they let on.