Annual Top Films Lists

Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2018: #96. Martin Zandvliet’s The Outsider

Published on January 1, 2018

The Outsider

Danish filmmaker Martin Zandvliet scored his first international success with his third feature, 2015’s tense WWII film Land of Mine (read review), which competed in TIFF’s first Platform Program, and went on to win a slew of festival recognition and box office receipts, earning the distinction of Denmark’s submission for the 2016 foreign language offering (if you haven’t had the opportunity, his 2009 debut Applause starring Paprika Steen as an alcoholic actress performing Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is well worth seeking out). As Land of Mine finally hit US theaters in early 2017, Zandvliet began to ready The Outsider, which focuses on a former American G.I. who joins the yakuza in post-WWII Japan. Initially, this project was meant to be Takashi Miike’s English language debut starring Tom Hardy, but scheduling conflicts caused the dissolution of that pairing. Jared Leto, Tadanobu Asano and Kippei Shîna star.

Release Date/Prediction: Zandvliet competed in Karlovy Vary with Applause (2009) and TIFF’s Platform with Land of Mine (2015). Currently in post-production, The Outsider seems like a star-studded English language title which will bring Zandvliet greater international acclaim, and if it doesn’t appear in Berlin, this may appear in a Cannes sidebar.

Nicholas Bell

Los Angeles based Nicholas Bell is IONCINEMA.com's Chief Film Critic and covers film festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and TIFF. He is part of the critic groups on Rotten Tomatoes, The Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA), the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and GALECA. His top 3 for 2021: France (Bruno Dumont), Passing (Rebecca Hall) and Nightmare Alley (Guillermo Del Toro). He was a jury member at the 2019 Cleveland International Film Festival.