War Games and the Man Who Stopped Them

2011 in Movies: foreign films

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It was another year in which foreign cinema was essential (although not as great as years past).  Three of the nominees for the 2010 Best Foreign Language Oscar were released in the US this year: Incendies , Dogtooth and the Oscar-winning In a Better World.   Incendies earned a very prominent spot on my Best Movies of 2011.  Joining Incendies on my Best Movies of 2011 are The Artist from France, Poetry from Korea, Carancho from Argentina and Potiche from France.  That’s five films – down from ten on my list for 2010 and the lowest number of foreign films on my list ever.

Still, the French had a fine historical drama in Sarah’s Key, the costume epic The Princess of Montpensier, the sexy comedy The Names of Love and the arty head scratcher Certified Copy.   Stylized violence characterized both the Japanese gangster film Outrage and the Samurai movie 13 Assassins.  There was a sly Mexican dark comedy, Norah’s Will.  Attenberg was a better Greek comedy than Dogtooth.

The Polish documentary War Games and the Man Who Stopped Them was excellent. Hungary delivered a small drama, Question in Details.  The Aussies gave us a very violent contemporary Western, Red Hill.  Germany and Austria produced a contemporary crime drama in The Robber.  Even the Bolivians gave us a pretty solid Western:  Blackthorn.

Here’s the trailer for Poetry.

2011 in Movies: documentaries

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PROJECT NIM

As usual, several documentaries made my list of Best Movies of 2011:  Project Nim, Buck and Tabloid.

Werner Herzog gave us the wonderful 3D Cave of Forgotten Dreams.  Page One highlighted David Carr of the New York Times.  The Polish documentary War Games and the Man Who Stopped Them was a great find.  I also admired Thunder Soul (about a Houston high school stage band in the 60s), Magic Bus (featuring actual footage of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters), American Grindhouse (about the grindhouse films of the 40s, 50s and early 60s) and These Amazing Shadows (about the National Film Registry).

PBS had stellar year, especially with Woody Allen: A Documentary, Jimmy Carter, Stonewall Uprising and Troubadours.

HBO delivered Bobby Fisher Against the World.  And ESPN has entered the documentary arena with the surprising The Marinovich Project.

Blogging from Cinequest: War Games and the Man Who Stopped Them

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This documentary tells the remarkable Cold War spy story of Army Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski.  In his service on the Polish General Staff, Kuklinski saw that the Warsaw Pact’s war plans for an invasion of Western Europe would inevitably lead to the nuclear obliteration of Poland.  To avoid that horror, he passed on the Warsaw Pact war plans to the West so NATO could strengthen its stance and thereby deter the invasion by making it a less attractive option for the Soviets.

Kuklinshi passed over 40,000 pages of secret Warsaw Pact documents to the CIA – the largest act of espionage in world history.  After the screening, Director Dariusz Jabloński said that Kuklinski considered himself a Polish soldier doing his duty, not a spy for the West.

Kuklinski died just before he could be interviewed for this documentary.  However, Jabloński did secure interviews with the senior commanders of the Soviet and Polish militaries, former Polish heads of state, CIA officers and Kuklinski’s widow, as well as screen shots from Warsaw Pact war simulations.  At 110 minutes, it’s a little long, but the story is compelling.