Daniel Bruhl, who most will recognise from his role as Private Zoller in Inglorious Basterds, is fantastic in the leading role as Alex. The film is incredibly funny and quite moving at times. I would highly recommend this to anyone.

Goyangileul butaghae (Take Care Of My Cat)Matt Haigh

Upon leaving high school, five young women struggle to remain close friends as each embarks upon adult life, encountering the pressures of jobs and boyfriends that threaten to diminish the camaraderie the gang possessed in school.

Tying them all together is a cat, given as a gift at a birthday party, and ultimately passed from hand to hand as the characters find their lives moving in unexpected directions.

This is director Jae-eun Jeong’s first film, and like another relatively new female director, Sofia Coppola, she works with a distinct, quirky visual style. Full of warmth and intimacy, but also the space and loneliness of a Korean cityscape at night, the visuals brilliantly evoke the transgressions of these character’s lives and the transient nature of friendship.

I happened upon this film by chance very late one night on Channel 4 and I instantly fell in love with it, for the same reasons I fell in love with Banana Yoshimoto’s debut novel, Kitchen. Like that book, Take Care of My Cat is full of a childlike wonder that imbues even the lonelier parts of life with a comforting quality, while carefully maintaining more of a bittersweet truth than a sugar-coated, schmaltzy lie.

Persepolis Julian Whitley

Based on her seminal graphic novel, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is an animated coming-of-age tale set during the Iranian Revolution. The film follows young Marji, a daughter of liberal parenthood, who rejects her government’s increasingly oppressive regime in favour a natural state of teenage rebellion.

Fearing her candour will lead to trouble, her parents send her to study in Vienna, where she can live without fear of arrest. However, becoming increasingly isolated in a country where liberty is taken for granted, Marji is forced to return to a country in a much worse state than before she left. Mounting tyranny and several personal tragedies force Marji to make bold decisions for her future.

A sometimes distressing viewing experience, the stark, relatively basic animation style somehow makes Marji’s tragedies, and those of the whole Iranian populace, seem all the more affecting. But Persepolis doesn’t simply revel in misery – the film is as joyous as it is harrowing, as Marji’s frankly hilarious, ever-so-slightly out of tune rendition of Eye Of The Tiger will attest.

Persepolis is one of those rare films that manage to grab you at both ends of the emotional spectrum, undoubtedly causing sadness and glee in equal measure.

Ryeong (The Ghost)Jenny Sanders

A little-known South Korean film, The Ghost tells the story of Min Ji-won, a schoolgirl suffering from amnesia and haunted by strange visions. As she recovers from whatever accident messed with her memory, people around her start dying. She fights to put the pieces together and realises that her previous life contained things she would rather remained forgotten…

It’s hard to explain any more without massive spoilers, but this is a film which takes all that was good from the likes of A Tale Of Two Sisters and Ringu and weaves it all together into something really quite clever. It looks great, the acting is excellent and some of the imagery will stay with you for ages afterwards. While a bit clichéd, it’s entertaining from start to finish – and the ending has a cracking twist.

Anybody who lives and breathes horror from the Far East might find this to be ‘more of the same’, but for anyone else it’s well worth watching and deserves recognition.

Ultimo Tango a Parigi (Last Tango In Paris) Doralba Picerno

This movie was released when I was too little to see it or understand its impact. For years all I heard about was how scandalous it was. Its release had huge repercussions, not least in the lives of the people involved, primarily director Bernardo Bertolucci and actress Maria Schneider, whose career was wrongly ostracised by the notoriety of the movie.

When I actually got to see it, I understood what the fuss was about: the big brouhaha over the infamous sex scene involving butter (as lubricant) was mostly to cover the outrage at the movie’s inherent anti-establishment stance. In that very scene an ageing Marlon Brando verbally attacks the very foundations of the family in a Christian society. This was almost blasphemous at the time, so much so that the movie was unjustly tagged as obscene (an Italian court ruling condemned it to be burnt!) and its director was stripped of his civil rights for five five years. (Funnily enough, all was forgotten when he won nine Oscars for The Last Emperor…).

With dialogue in French and English (Brando actually plays an American living in Paris), it is an accessible foreign cult movie, one that stimulates the intellect, and whose message has not been diluted after all these years, and one of Bertolussci most poignant examples of his early political oeuvre.

C’est arrivé près de chez vous (Man Bites Dog)Michael Leader

Just one? Cripes. Where to start? This is almost carte blanche to go art-house, to strike a pose and declare ‘This Is The Canon’. Something by Jean Renoir? Tarkovsky? How about À bout de souffle? La jetée? 8 1/2? I’ll go against all inner urges to whip out the beret and condescend, and instead highlight – for your esteemed consideration – the 1992 Belgian flick Man Bites Dog.

Exhibited at the same Cannes Film Festival as Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Man Bites Dog shares more than just a canine-derived title, offering a similarly comic look at violence and society, with tricks and quirks borrowed from low-budget indie filmmaking.

Man Bites Dog is a black and white mockumentary, in which a group of shoe-string filmmakers follow around a hardened serial killer, Benoît (Benoît Poelvoorde). The film mixes up scenes of Ben’s day-to-day criminal activities (‘I usually start the month with a postman’), and more biographical sequences with his family and friends. Poelvoorde’s gives a powerhouse performance, carrying the film while creating a uniquely bizarre character. Benoît is a gentleman crook, a charismatic drinking buddy, and an effete pseudo-philosopher quick to wax lyrical on architecture and art.

He is also arrogant, bigoted and aggressively self-centered. He plays up to the camera, and before long, the film crew find themselves complicit in his cycle of murders and – most chillingly – a brutal rape. It is a deftly-handled shift from dark comedy to a wholly unsettling commentary on the media’s two-way relationship with the horrors of society.

It’s a startling piece of work, tinged with a sense of unfulfilled promise, as the three-headed directing-writing-acting team – Poelvoorde, Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel – have yet to match this early peak in their careers, which, with Belvaux’s death in 2006, seems unlikely to ever happen. In Man Bites Dog, however, they produced a film that was cut from the same cloth as Tarantino, offering a quotable, gripping, stylized crime drama, yet did so with an intelligent, polemical edge that their American counterpart has yet to attain.

Låt den rätte komma i (Let The Right One In)Matt Edwards

Whilst I’m aware that Let The Right One In is a recent film, that is actually part of the reason I would recommend it. The idea being that by recommending the latest, hippest foreign film, I’m going to look pretty bloody cool. Also, people will know I’m not just jumping on the bandwagon when I complain about how awful the remake is when it comes out. Plus, it’s a film I only have on Blu-ray, meaning that I have an excuse not to lend out my copy when I make the recommendation.

The film itself is incredible. Perhaps the only film to be able to tick the boxes ‘awesome vampire film’ and ‘touching drama’. The cold, Swedish winter setting gives the film a beautiful look and all of the performances, especially that of Lina Leandersson as Eli, are superb.If it starts out a little slowly, it’s only to establish everything it needs to to set up the amazing find 3 quarters of the film.

Honestly, for all of the ranting I could do about the film, we’d probably all be better off if you just took my word for it and saw the film. I would lend it to you, but I’ve only got it on Blu-ray so it won’t work on your DVD player. Sorry.