tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

They're young, beautiful and talented, but some of them maybe quite unfamiliar to some of you. In our latest List of 10, tMF compilled 10 Foreign (if you like, Non-American) actresses and the must-see movies that made them 'hot properties' locally. Some of them joined Hollywood already - but have you seen them at their BEST?

- - - - - -

It's a pity many of the roles given to them in Hollywood are not what you can call 'prestige' roles. Most of them are given the usual run-of-the-mill characters. Why not take a good look at their previous works and find out why we think they're awesome!
- - -
# 10 - Maria Valverde (Spain) - Maria Valverde was born in Madrid and says she always wanted to become an actress. She finally fulfilled her dream at the age of 16 with a leading role in Manuel Martín Cuenca movie, La flaqueza del bolchevique. She also won the 2003 Goya Award for her role. She has also taken part in several films, such as Melissa P, a film based on the polemic book One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by Melissa Panarello. Valverde and Juan Jose Ballesta also teamed up for the film, Ladrones (Thieves). You can watch the trailer of Melissa P. below:

- - - - - -

Valverde will be introduced to a wider audience very soon. She's one of the cast in Jordan Scott's Cracks, with Eva Green and Juno Temple. [ More of Cracks here ]

- - -
# 9 - Monica Belluci (Italy) - Quite a familiar name right? But if you've only seen her recent films - The Matrix Reloaded, Brothers Grimm or Shoot Em Up, you have yet to see her play her best. In Giuseppe Tornatore war-drama Malena, she is the star of the movie unlike the ones we've mentioned where she only played supporting parts.

- - - - - -

Says Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicles:

At the film's center is Monica Bellucci, previously known only to a handful of film critics and European directors as one of the most stunning women in the world. Bellucci's performance is completely effective and rather curious, in that it involves little dialogue, and for that matter, little change in facial expression. One might be tempted to give in to the facile conviction that it's hardly a performance at all, that the actress's beauty is merely a blank canvas onto which the audience projects its own emotions. But it's not true. Bellucci conveys much through subtle means. Malena's walks through town alone add up to significant pieces of acting. As a newcomer living in the home of her father-in-law while her husband fights in North Africa, Bellucci suggests a complicated set of internal processes. Malena knows her beauty causes a commotion. She doesn't court it, doesn't want it, but at the same time, this is nothing new, and she's not angry about it. Her goal is not to interact, to go about her business. Later, her walk changes, imperceptibly. She becomes more weathered, more stooped, yet more assured and dignified, less full of dread. [ read more ]

Oh, and she's also in Brotherhood of the Wolf too!

- - -
# 8 - Keisha Castle-Hughes (New Zealand) - At 13, Keisha Castle-Hughes was the youngest nominee ever for a lead actress Oscar for her role as the tradition-bending girl in the indie hit "Whale Rider" -- and she became the town's darling. Five years later, Castle-Hughes has returned to Los Angeles to relaunch her career as an adult. There's been a world of change since her last Oscar-season visit; this time, she has a fiancé and a toddler in tow.

Castle-Hughes was discovered for the role in Niki Caro's "Whale Rider" by the same casting director who found Anna Paquin. At age 11 she played Pai, the Maori girl who has to fight her grandfather to fulfill her destiny. She spent years on the film festival circuit, then the premiere circuit, then the Oscar circuit, all for her first film. After that heady time, Castle-Hughes, who is half-Maori, went home to Auckland. [ More from the LA Times ]

- - - - - -

- - -
# 7 - Julia Jentsch (Germany) - One of Germany's rising stars, Julia Jentsch plays the title role of "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days," the true story of Germany's most famous anti-Nazi heroine. Scholl has won great acclaim for a luminous performance as the young coed-turned-fearless activist, winning the Best Actress at the 2005 Lola Awards and at  the Berlin Film Festival. The film is Germany's official Foreign Language Film selection for the 2005 awards.

- - - - - -

Jentsch also starred in the hit film "The Edukators" opposite Daniel Bruhl.

- - -
# 6 - Deborah Francois (Belgium) - There are 2 big reasons why you need to know more about award-winning Belgian actress Deborah Francois... First, she's the star of three highly-acclaimed movies - Cannes big winner, the Dardenne Brothers' The Child (L'Enfant), the dramatic-thriller The Page Turner (La Tourneuse de pages) and the recent Sundance favorite and François’ first English-speaking film — Unmade Beds, by Argentine director-writer Alexis Dos Santos.

- - - - - -

[ read more of tMF's profile of Ms. Deborah Francois here ]

- - -
# 5 - Isild Le Besco (France) - Writes Leslie Camhi at the NY Times: At 22, the gifted and singular actress Isild Le Besco can already claim an extensive career in French cinema. At 14, she starred in "La Puce," Emmanuelle Bercot's short film about a girl's first sexual experience. A couple of years later, she was playing the love interest in Benoît Jacquot's "Sade" and Cédric Kahn's "Robert Succo." And by 18, Ms. Le Besco, was writing and directing "Demi-Tarif," shot with a digital camera mostly in the apartment where she grew up, in a working-class Paris neighborhood. Opening here this summer, it follows three children, largely abandoned by their mother, who make do on their own. A portrait of childhood by someone still close enough in age to hear its echo, "Demi-Tarif" ("Half-Price") was hailed upon its French release by the pioneering avant-garde filmmaker Chris Marker as the "Breathless" of its generation.

The trailer from her latest film, Je Te Mangerais:

- - - - - -

I'm thrilled that le Besco is part of The Good Heart, featuring Paul Dano and Brian Cox, from filmmaker Dagur Kári.

- - -
# 4 - Carice van Houten (the Netherlands) - Until now I have no idea why Paul Verhoeven's Black Book was not nominated at the Oscars. Perhaps the thought of seeing van Houten thrown with more than a bucketful of human feces is too much for the members of the Academy? But I think too many people simply hate Paul Verhoeven...

Oh, and yes - Carice Van Houten - she's the reason why I love the film. I don't know any Dutch word, but I watched it without any English subtitles and I enjoyed it immensely. I find the movie quite stunning and it gave me more than just an introduction into how the Dutch resisted the German occupation of The Netherlands during WW2.

- - - - - -

Back to Carice! Says Peter Travers @Rolling Stone:

But the film belongs to van Houten, 29, a sexy, showstopping beauty with the gift possessed by only the best actors to make you feel the emotions roiling beneath the surface. Verhoeven is counting on the fact that we'll follow her anywhere, and we do. Not to give too much away, but Black Book takes us down byzantine corridors concerning the traitors and profiteers in the Dutch Resistance and the abuse of prisoners after the war that rivaled Abu Ghraib. Verhoeven bites off more than he can handily chew. He wouldn't be Verhoeven if he didn't. But his tremendously exciting film can suddenly, unpredictably move you to tears. [ read more ]

- - -
# 3 - Franka Potente (Germany) - I just love her in The Bourne Identity. I think it was in this Matt Damon movie that the wider movie audiences got to know her better. Of course, she's already a big star in Germany courtesy of Run Lola Run, which also happens to be a personal favorite of mine. She was also outstanding in The Elementary Particles and Romulus, My Father, among her many films.

- - - - - -

Run Lola Run won the 1999 Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and Best Foreign Film at the 2000 Independent Spirit Awards. It was also nominated for Best Film not in the English Language by BAFTA.

I'm looking forward to watch her in The Cheeseburger Manifesto, a romantic-comedy from Ted Nicolaou. It tells the story of an arrogant young executive for an American auto company smuggles a million dollars in bribe money to Romania weeks after the revolution to grease the wheels of the post-Communist bureaucracy.

- - -
# 2 - Emmanuelle Devos (France) - If you've seen her in Kings and Queen, then you'll know why she's at this high position. Says Manohla Dargis @The NY Times:

Late in his new film "Kings and Queen," the wildly gifted French director Arnaud Desplechin yanks the rug from under his characters and sends both them and us reeling. Up until that point, Mr. Desplechin has seemed like a disinterested witness to the goings-on of his two principal characters, Nora (Emmanuelle Devos), a bourgeois mother who runs an art gallery, and her former lover, a violist named Ismaël (Mathieu Amalric). But any idea that Mr. Desplechin has opted for some kind of authorial neutrality, a behind-the-scenes politesse, as it were, vanishes when a third character abruptly delivers a late-act speech so steeped in bile it upends everything we think we've understood in this story. [ read more ]

Here's the trailer:

- - - - - -

Adds Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian: Kings and Queen errs occasionally on the side of garrulity and whimsy, but its imaginative licence is often superb and it is outstandingly acted by Emmanuelle Devos as Nora, the beautiful art gallery director whose father (Maurice Garrel) is dying, and Mathieu Amalric as her turbulent former partner Ismaël, a manic depressive musician who begins the movie being carted off to an institution, where his fractious mental state is assessed by a droll psychiatrist, played in cameo by Catherine Deneuve.

She was also superb playing a rather short role in The Beat that My Heart Skipped, as the latest 'girl' of Romain Duris' father. Duris and Devos' conversation at the cafe is simply fascinating - a sort of competition for the attention of one man, who is a lover to one and a father to the other. I don't think any other actors could pull it off. Oh and she's also fantastic in La Moustache.

You'll be able to watch her in Coco Before Chanel, featuring Audrey Tautou.

- - -
# 1 - Giovanna Mezzogiorno (Italy) - Mezzogiorno has it all - she's a stunning beauty and a multi-awarded actress all over Europe. One of her films, The Beast in the Heart, was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars. But it was her performance in Facing Windows ( La finestra di Fronte) that really impressed me. Plus the fact that the movie is a very good one with such an amazing cast and what a terrific story!

- - - - - -

Says Stephen Holden at the New York Times:

''Facing Windows,'' a lush, surreally flavored immersion in voyeurism and romantic dreams, muses on many of the same themes as Alfred Hitchcock's ''Rear Window'' and ''Vertigo,'' but from a more conventional emotional perspective. This seductive Italian film uses the image of beautiful strangers secretly and obsessively studying each other through opposite windows to reflect on two related romantic quandaries: the ''grass is always greener'' and ''absence makes the heart grow fonder.'' Last year, ''Facing Windows'' swept the David di Donatello awards (Italy's Oscars) and helped establish Ferzan Ozpetek, who directed the gay-oriented cult films ''His Secret Love'' and ''Steam,'' as an international voice to be reckoned with. Despite its surreal touches and an improbable story that piles on the metaphors, the movie, which has a rich, honey-dripping score by Andrea Guerra, maintains a tone of refined heart-tugging realism. Its bittersweet emotional mood recalls Vittorio De Sica's 1970 masterpiece, ''The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,'' whose Holocaust theme is echoed here more softly and from a much greater distance. In the close-ups of Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who plays Giovanna, an unhappily married 29-year-old mother of two, and Raoul Bova as Lorenzo, the bachelor bank manager across the way, the camera swoons over two faces of luminous beauty and sensitivity. [ read more ]

- - -
What's on your mind? Are the names of these actresses already familiar to you? Have you seen any of the movies starring them? Any particular names you think should also be on this list? Let us know what you think!
- - -