Every Friday morning, I eagerly flip to the Arts section of the newspaper to look at the new movie releases. Most weeks I’ll find a couple new movies I’m interested in. But for the first few weeks of each year, everything changes. Movies are only eligible for the Academy Awards if they’re released by the end of December, so movie studios rarely release their best films at the very beginning of the new year. While I wasn’t particularly surprised, I certainly wasn’t pleased to find that the selection of new movies last weekend included The Hottie and the Nottie and Hannah Montana/Miley Cirus: 3D. However, there is one exception to the awards eligibility rules: foreign films.

Movies produced in other countries only have to come out in their home country by the end of December; studios can release them in America as late as they want. So while the past few weeks have been severely lacking in decent American movies, they’ve been abundant in quality foreign cinema. Two movies in particular, Persepolis and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, really blew me away.

A unique animated experience, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical story of growing during the Iranian Revolution. Marjane spends the first ten years of her life in Iran, watching it evolve from a free society to a repressive Islamic republic. As a child, she loves American music, but Islamic laws forbid her from legally purchasing any. However, as she walks down crowded streets in Teheran, men in long trench coats subtly try to sell her bootlegged cassette tapes of Michael Jackson and other 1970s pop icons.

Four years after the outbreak of the Iranian Revolution, Marjane’s parents send her to a school in Vienna to get away from the brutal regime. There she is miserable, desperately missing her family and culture, but she finds ways to adapt. She befriends a group of nihilists and attends heavy metal concerts with them, screaming and gyrating (oh, what humans will do to fit in…). After a bad relationship, however, she gets kicked out of her home-stay and ultimately returns to her family in Iran, where society has completely transformed in the years Marjane was gone.

While the story alone is fascinating, the animation is just as captivating. Characters are all black and white, while the environment around them consists of textured shades of gray. This peculiar technique gives a feeling of depth to the two-dimensional animation. It also gives it the look of a graphic novel (appropriately, given that the film is based on a series of comic books by Satrapi).

I thoroughly enjoyed most of the movie, but there were times at which Marjane began to annoy me. Her tendencies to rebel and “fight the man,” as it were, define the film, but also come across as unnecessary in certain situations. It became tedious watching her argue her way out of places to sleep, time after time. I wanted her to just stay quiet for once so she wouldn’t end up on the streets, but alas, animated characters never listen to me.

More recently, I saw another visually stunning film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Also based on a true story, Diving Bell chronicles the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the chief editor of Elle magazine who suddenly suffered a paralyzing stroke at the age of 43. The film opens as he wakes up from his stroke three weeks later, confused and disoriented, only to find that he can no longer move or speak.

As he can’t move his mouth, Bauby learns to communicate by blinking. He then undertakes the painstaking process of compiling his reflections on life by blinking one letter at a time to a scribe. The film jumps back and forth between Bauby’s paralyzed life and memories of his life before the stroke.

Diving Bell is most successful at making the audience experience Bauby’s paralytic state. Almost half of the film is shot from his perspective, evoking a very claustrophobic feeling. While it’s initially uncomfortable, the first-person view makes the story far more personal.

I feel like I’ve seen way too many movies about disabled people overcoming great obstacles to reach their dreams. Not to say those stories are bad, they’ve just become very formulaic in the world of cinema. Diving Bell takes a completely different approach. It’s much more about Bauby coming to terms with his physical condition and reflecting on the unresolved strands of his past.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is one of the most powerful and effective movie in the last several years, but it’s certainly not the type of movie everybody would enjoy. It’s slow-paced and very little happens. But to me, that’s what makes it all the more impressive. The film never lost my attention in two hours, and despite the language barrier, it came across as incredibly elegant and heartbreaking.

The same is true of many foreign films. They often have a much slower pace, and the language barrier and cultural differences can make the story harder to follow. That’s what I respect about foreign movies the most. They have to be effective on so many more levels than American films for English-speaking audiences to appreciate them.

And yes, while foreign films are great from time to time, sometimes it’s nice to just go to the movies to zone out and watch something simple and entertaining. But I still have my limits. Seriously, Hollywood, The Hottie and the Nottie?