Documentaries and foreign films, for the most part, are thrown into a cinematic void in North America. If not on PBS, or featuring Al Gore or Michael Moore, the docs usually don't get seen. The same goes for films that have, gasp!, subtitles. Both are pretty unfortunate, considering the amazing selections that each offers. Yet even with breakthroughs like An Inconvenient Truth, Amelie, or The Passion of the Christ, documentaries and foreign films hit a very low ceiling when it comes to mainstream viewing.

And this is really ticking off Michael Moore. The Hollywood Reporter has posted that the documentary filmmaker is "mad as hell" about the fact that both types of films are shut out of theaters, and he is itching to change it. Moore says: "My new year's resolution is to sit down with the heads of exhibition chains and have them devote one screen in their multiplexes to nonfiction and foreign films." (Another option they're looking into: one night a week, like the usually-weak Monday nights.) He continues: "People want to see documentaries, but there's a disconnect between that desire and the exhibitors out there. We're not asking for charity. This could be on the 15th screen of a multiplex that would otherwise have the sixth showing of the new Harry Potter movie. Some of these films make $200 or $300 per screen."

I would love to see this happen. However, I worry about what happens after the initial rush. It's so very easy to say, if the starting box office take is week, that it wouldn't work. Hopefully, they'll realize that it takes some time to foster. Many people might shun the possibility, but then there are those who will take a chance, fall in love with what they see, and not only bring their friends, but have their eyes opened to two huge, and wonderful areas of cinema. Then again, I'm wishing big, in hopes that original films can start thriving instead of the continual barrage of remakes.

According to a poll conducted by Pearl and Dean of UK movie audiences, Pan's Labyrinth, from Spain and Mexico, has officially become the nation's favorite foreign film. It and the #2 choice, Amelie (France) are currently the two all-time imported box office champs in the country's history. The rest of the list leaned drastically toward current films, award-winners and money-makers: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (China) and Spirited Away (Japan) (tied for third), City of God (Brazil), Cinema Paradiso (Italy), The Lives of Others (Germany), Life Is Beautiful (Italy), The Motorcycle Diaries (Mexico/Argentina) and Cache (a.k.a. Hidden) (France/Austria). (No Seven Samurai?)

Kathryn Jacob of Pearl and Dean saw good news in the poll: "Foreign films are now seven times more likely to be British box-office hits than they were a decade ago. British film audiences are becoming increasingly sophisticated and are no longer letting subtitles be a barrier to their enjoyment of a great film. Pan's Labyrinth is a beautiful example of a film that would have struggled to get screened in a multiplex 10 years ago, but which has truly captured the imagination of British cinema audiences today."

As I reported over the weekend, Israel's submission for next year's foreign-language category at the Oscars is The Band's Visit, a well-received comedy about an Egyptian police band that gets lost in Israel. It swept the Ophirs (Israel's Oscar equivalent), winning eight awards including best picture and best director. It won awards at Sarajevo and Cannes. And Sony Pictures Classics reportedly paid more for it than anyone has ever paid for an Israeli film.

So what's the problem, Oscar-wise? It might have too much English in it.

L.A. Weekly's Nikki Finke reported on Sunday that the film's "rivals" -- people involved with movies that weren't selected, one assumes -- are claiming that more than 50 percent of The Band's Visit's dialogue is in English. The Academy rules for this category (which you can read in their entirety here) simply say that to be eligible, a film must be "predominantly" in a language other than English. The rules don't give specifics about percentages.

Cinematical's James Rocchi saw the film at Toronto (and liked it). His recollection is that it was mostly in Hebrew and Arabic without too much English. He told me: "The use of English to me seemed like either a) people talking about song lyrics or other concerns in the language they were written in or b) a natural sort of meeting place -- 'I speak Arabic; you speak Hebrew; we both speak bad English....'"

The Academy won't get into it until after the Oct. 1 submission deadline. If they decide the film is not "predominantly" in a foreign tongue, they'll disqualify it -- and it won't be the first time. Just two years ago, Singapore's entry, Be with Me, was bounced for this very reason. We'll keep you posted on the fate of Israel's film.

The nations of the world have until Oct. 1 to submit their entries for the Best Foreign Language Film category in next year's Oscars, and Variety reports that the Philippines has chosen its candidate: Donsol, a drama about two lonely people who meet in a seaside town of that name during the whale-watching season.

The film has picked up a few awards at various festivals, including Cinemalaya and the Ft. Lauderdale International Film Festival. It's the first film by director Adolfo Alix, Jr., though he co-wrote a film, Small Voices, that was the Philippines' Oscar submission for 2002.

The Philippines has submitted an Oscar entry just about every year for the past decade or so (rarely before that), but has never received a nomination. We'll know on January 22 whether this is finally their year.

As we've reported on various countries' candidates for the Best Foreign Language Film category at next year's Oscars, we've observed that many of them are longshots at best. Countries like the Philippines and Singapore have never even secured a nomination in the category, let alone a win. That's not to say it won't happen this year; just that it's not as likely.

But now two countries with solid Oscar track records have announced their entries: Israel is putting up The Band's Visit, while the Czech Republic offers I Served the King of England. Israel has submitted a film every year since 1977 and fairly regularly before that, earning six nominations but no wins so far. The Czech Republic had six nominations including two wins back when it was Czechoslovakia; since the split in 1993, Czech Republic has had three nominations, with a win in 1996.

Israel's The Band's Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret) automatically became its Oscar entry when it took the top prize at the Israeli Film Academy Awards on Thursday. The comedy, about an Egyptian police band that gets lost in Israel, won the audience award at the Sarajevo Film Festival and the Jury Coup Du Coeur in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. It also played at Toronto, where Cinematical's lovely and talented James Rocchi reviewed it favorably. Sony Pictures Classics is set to release it in the U.S.; Variety says the amount they paid was a record for an Israeli film.

I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále) is based on an epic novel and spans years before and after World War II. It was directed by Jiri Menzel, whose film Closely Watched Trains won the Oscar back in 1968.

The exotic far-Eastern nation of Singapore has never been a significant player in the international film community. In fact, according to IMDB, only 278 films or TV shows have EVER been made there, all together, since the dawn of cinema. Hollywood churns out more than that in a month, and that's only counting romantic comedies.

But Variety reports that Singapore has submitted a film for consideration for next year's Best Foreign-Language Oscar category: 881, a musical comedy set in the world of "getai." Our friend Wikipedia tells us that getai is a boisterous live stage performance full of gaudy costumes and kitschy, crude jokes. (I'm sure I have oversimplified, but if we have any Singaporean readers, perhaps they can tell us more about it in the comments.) The film, directed by Royston Tan, has been a huge hit locally since opening Aug. 9.

This is only the second time that Singapore has ever submitted a film for the Oscars. The last time was two years ago, when Be with Me was entered ... and then disqualified for being mostly in English. Doh!

Over at the blog Edward Copeland on Film, Mr. Copeland has compiled the results of a project he started a few months ago, with film writers -- bloggers, critics, professors, and so on -- voting on the 100 best movies ever made in a language other than English. He had a nominating committee of 51 people (including Cinematical's Kim Voynar) determine the list of nominees, and then the voting was open. There were a few stipulations: Documentaries, shorts, silent films, and movies newer than 2002 weren't eligible.

A total of 174 ballots were entered. The top 10 is as follows. (See the entire top 100 here.)

1. The Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir, French
2. The Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa, Japanese
3. M, Fritz Lang, German
4. 8 1/2, Federico Fellini, Italian
5. Bicycle Thieves (more commonly -- and erroneously -- known as The Bicycle Thief), Vittorio de Sica, Italian
6. Persona, Ingmar Bergman, Swedish
7. Grand Illusion, Jean Renoir, French
8. Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Werner Herzog, German
9. The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo, French & Arabic
10. The 400 Blows, Francois Truffaut, French

No huge surprises there, except maybe that I'd have thought Bergman's Seventh Seal (#15) would be higher than his Persona. In the top 100 list, the names are the ones you'd expect: Kurosawa (7 times), Bergman (7), Fellini (5), Truffaut (4), Godard (5), etc. Renoir makes it just twice -- but they're both in the top 10!

As far as languages go, French is by far the most heavily represented, with 35 films (by my count) on the list. Italian is next (15), followed by Japanese (13). Russian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, and Swedish are all represented a few times each, the latter two thanks entirely to Krzysztof Kieslowski and Ingmar Bergman, respectively. Danish shows up twice in the works of Carl Dreyer. Hungarian and Portuguese appear just once each, in Satantango (#97) and City of God (#26).

Any languages you're surprised not to see represented? (What, no Korean? No Middle Eastern languages except for the Arabic parts of The Battle of Algiers?) Which specific films do you think got left off? (I'm a sucker for Life Is Beautiful.) Discuss, discuss!

One of the most maddening things about film fests is that when the film selection announcements first start rolling out, you can hardly ever find anything about most of them. It's enough to drive a cinephile insane how few independent films have official websites up (or even enough info on their IMDb pages) by the time their fest inclusion is announced. I get that a lot of these filmmakers may be frantically in post getting their film ready for the fest, or working three jobs to pay off the credit card debt they amassed while making their films, but surely they have friends or relatives who could at least slap together a MySpace page or something.

I can wait for the professional, proofread-90-times production notes if I have to, but filmmakers, seriously! We want, nay, we need, info about your films. There are tons of films in a fest the size of TIFF, and only so many films our crew can see before their eyeballs explode. If your film isn't being repped by one of the big agencies who will pimp your film night and day until we get our butts to a screening, you need to give us enough about your film to make it rise above the fray to get us to see it. If you're a filmmaker and you have a film in TIFF, and you have an official site that's not listed on IMDb (and if it's not, list it), or you have production notes, anything, really, that will tell me why I should make sure someone on our team sees your film, email me at kim(at)cinematical(dot)com. In the meantime, I've poked around and rounded up what info I could find on the bevy of international films announced for the TIFF slate on Wednesday.

When I go through each week's new film releases for my website, I have a template that lets me fill in the blanks. One line reads: "Language: [blank] with English subtitles." Lately I've noticed that I've often been deleting that line, which means that most of the new releases have been in English. This is not a new development, but it's a distressing one nonetheless. The downside is that we just don't know what we're missing. During World War II -- understandably -- the United States did not import any Japanese or German films; in the 1980s, it did not import any Iranian films. And to this day, the number of Vietnamese films shown here can be counted on one hand.

In the 1960s, however, a period of intellectualism prevailed and there was an air of excitement over the latest imports: College students, writers and journalists became entranced with the latest films by Godard, Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Truffaut, Renais, Satyajit Ray, Chabrol, Kurosawa, Bunuel, Bresson, etc. The list goes on. To read some of the reviews and essays of the time, you sense that it was truly believed that these artists could change cinema and convert it into a genuine art form, perhaps for the very first time.

Most people know the rest of the story. The 1970s ushered in the so-called "American Renaissance," with its band of young maverick filmmakers. When we talk about the 1970s, we talk about Altman, Bogdanovich, Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, Malick, Penn, etc., but rarely do we hear mentioned the great achievements from other countries: Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Eric Rohmer's Claire's Knee, Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating, Bergman's Cries and Whispers, Bresson's Lancelot du Lac, Tarkovsky's Solaris, Bunuel's last three films and a dozen Fassbinder films. ...

• Notable among American films debuting in foreign territories this weekend are The Pink Panther, bowing on hundreds of screen across France, Germany, and Australia, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which is moving on to China after a tremendously successful release in Japan. Poor Tristan Isolde, meanwhile, will stagger into Spain and New Zealand, hoping that somewhere on earth, people won't have heard how bad it is.

• Catalina Sandino Moreno, an Oscar nominee for Maria Full of Grace, will lead an multi-national cast in The Heart Of The Earth, a Spanish-UK-Portugal co-production set to begin shooting in Spain and Portugal later this month. The story is yet another of those inspired-by-real-events, this one about an uprising at a British-owned silver mine in 18th century Spain. Among Moreno's costars will be Brits Sienna Guillory and Hugh Dancy, as well as Cuba's Jorge Perugorría.

• One of the increasingly rare children's book adaptation not being done by Walden Media is Aussie Unjoo Moon's version of The Wicked, Wicked Ladies In The Haunted House. Written by Pulitzer-winner Mary Close, the book, aimed at a grade-school audience, is "a suspenseful ghost story cum mystery in moody, atmospheric prose that blends dark magic and a dry wit occasionally reminiscent of Roald Dahl." Moon hopes that the film will be shot by Oscar winning Memoirs of a Geisha lensman Dion Beebe, to whom she happens to be married.

• Canada's own Walk of Fame is exploding with stars: it was announced recently that Pamela Anderson, Brendan Fraser, Eugene Levy and Robert Goulet are 2006's honorees, and will be inducted at a June ceremony. Surely Eugene Levey never imagined he's be lucky enough to one day share a stage with both Pam Anderson AND Robert Goulet.