The 50 best foreign films of all time

Our number one choice is, appropriately, a film of firsts: the first serial-killer movie, the celebrated director Fritz Lang's first sound production—and the movie he personally prized above all his others. It marries the fanciful expressionist techniques of the filmmaker's epic silents like Metropolis to a frighteningly realistic tale of a child-murdering psychopath, and its influence can be felt all the way up to our own Sevens and Saws. But the monstrous Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) is no cheer-'em-on villain like Jigsaw: First shown abstractly as a threatening shadow on the wall, the character is brought slowly and precisely into focus, until he himself becomes a victim, hunted down and dragged before a kangaroo court, where the moral divide all but evaporates. This politically charged classic reflected the German audiences' adoration of the dawning Nazi party back on itself, and its enduring lessons (for both cinema and society) are as much global as local.

"This is not a comedy of manners," states a title card at the beginning of Jean Renoir's masterpiece—a declaration that's only half right. Though this tale of the idle rich in France is technically a country-estate farce, it's far more than a mere satire of upper-crust affectations. Under the guise of mocking the bourgeoisie as they negotiate romantic minefields, Renoir had also delivered a cunning commentary on old-world Europe; a cri de coeur at the hypocrisy of class pretensions; and finally, a rich, rewarding work of art that's equal parts irony and sympathy. Everybody has their reasons for loving this sublime skewering of the entitled, which rewrote the rules of cinema entirely.

A quiet Japanese village is under siege by bandits. The rural residents hire a septet of warriors to defend them. Simple, right? Yet Akira Kurosawa's game-changing chanbara turns that basic concept into one of the greatest, grandest action films of all time. This sword-clashing spectacle not only gave future moviemakers a highly malleable plot (it's been used for everything from The Magnificent Seven to A Bug's Life). It also proved that Hollywood didn't have a lock on vast, visceral epics of courage under fire.

"Without mercy, man is like a beast," says a compassionate father in Kenji Mizoguchi's poignant tragedy. The Japanese director spent his career detailing how kindness must fight to survive in a harsh world, and here, the director takes a folkloric legend and turns it into a quietly epic struggle of against-all-odds endurance. A mother is separated from her son and daughter, who are sold to the title character—a government official whose cruelty is legendary. Years pass, and the now-grown offspring have given up on seeing their mom ever again...until an overheard ballad sparks hope. Every one of the filmmaker's signature camera movements and lyrical sequences sets the stage for a climax that's unbearably heart-wrenching and undeniably beautiful; the way that Mizoguchi wrings sobs from viewers without stooping to sentiment confirms his status as a peerless melodramatist.

Jean-Luc Godard was one of the first directors to lean into the idea that style can be substance. Breathless is the late French troublemaker’s most popular and enduring film, and its legacy owes itself to an effortless cool that can’t be faked and hasn’t ever really been matched. The nouvelle vague was already underway by the time Breathless arrived, but Godard truly codified it here, with his unconventional jump cuts, improvised dialogue and a score blending classical music with French pop. Plot-wise, it’s a story of a low-level thief who shacks up with an American newspaper girl after he’s accused of killing a police officer. But in truth, it’s really a movie about two incredibly attractive people – Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, to be precise – hanging out in Paris, having freewheeling conversations about pop culture, wearing awesome clothes and just generally being cool and attractive together. It remains magnetic in a way few films are. 

Named after Federico Fellini's own filmographic progression—six features and three shorts—this semiautobiographical account of an auteur-cum-avatar stuck in a rut (Marcello Mastroianni, in prime Euro-suave mode) took interior cinema to a whole new level. Nightmarish dream sequences and sexed-up fantasies involving harems bump up against transcendental flights of fancy—especially a claustrophobic traffic jam that opens the movie—all rendered with the Mondo Italiano surrealism that would come to be described as Felliniesque. Directors had toured their thinly disguised inner selves onscreen before, but nobody had mapped the contours of their own confused psyche with such free-form abandon. The film's influence on every moviemaker with a yen to translate creative anxiety into art can't be overstated.

Restraint had no finer champion than France's Robert Bresson, who, with quiet knockouts like A Man Escaped (1956) and Pickpocket (1959), introduced an entirely new grammar to movie screens. But instead, we're inclined to honor this heartbreaker, a religious parable whose reputation has grown hugely in just the past decade. Our main character is, in fact, a donkey—but don't feel like an ass for investigating. In keeping with Bresson's less-is-more philosophy (he called his actors "models"), this sweet animal becomes a potent symbol for the uncaring hearts of others, as Balthazar is shuttled from owner to owner. The plot is both Christ-like and Job-like, with a thematic richness that ennobles all viewers who submit to it.

Ingmar Bergman’s surrealist masterpiece is a claustrophobic mindfuck bordering on psychological horror. Starring Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson as two women – the former an actress suffering from an unknown affliction, the latter her live-in nurse – who seemingly begin fusing into the same person during an extended stay at an isolated seaside cabin, the movie is more of an abstract visual poem than a narrative story, and critics still argue over its true meaning. But knowledge of psychoanalysis and the Brechtian technique is not required to be deeply creeped out by it. Bergman constantly upends any attempt at a narrative throughline with seemingly random images – a dead lamb, a crucifixion and a flash of a sudden erect penis – meta-filmic references, including a shot of cinematographer Sven Nykvist filming the movie itself. It’s a traumatic experience you’ll keep thinking about long after you’ve given up trying to figure it all out.

If merely for its introduction of a pushy photographer named Paparazzo (a small but crucial role), Federico Fellini's satire has had more cultural influence than even Jaws. Statements about modern celebrity begin here; the catty trashiness that dominates today's mediascape could really benefit from a glinting eye like that of the savage Italian humorist. Fellini, for all his tremendous influence, has been dogged by charges of shallowness. Let's refute that idea right now: Marcello Mastroianni's guilt-ridden gossip columnist, a journalist who back-burnered his literary aspirations, is a prophetic creation of enormous resonance, a self-deprecating sellout wandering the alleyways of civilization wondering what might have been. La Dolce Vita is the moment when cinema addresses its own decadence, relishing the "sweet life" while mourning the future.

Inspired by Douglas Sirk's great Hollywood melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955), Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapted its central "forbidden love" conceit to the socially charged present. Emmi (Brigitte Mira), a German hausfrau, falls for a young Arab immigrant named Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), much to the chagrin of her friends and family. This is a devastatingly honest film: Fassbinder's portrayal of the relationship (which nonchalantly breaks taboos of age and race) is revolutionary. And Emmi and Ali's own flaws and foibles—her world-weary certitude, his youthful, exasperating impatience—come to the fore the longer they stay with each other.

How does one describe Akira Kurosawa's multiperspective fable about an alleged crime? It depends on whom you ask: Fans will pinpoint this as the film that cemented the fertile relationship between the director and his favorite actor, Toshiro Mifune. Historians will praise it as the movie that almost single-handedly introduced Japanese cinema to Western audiences. And still others will glorify it as a piece of postmodern storytelling that proves truth exists solely in the mind of the beholder. We'll simply call it a tour de force that never ceases to amaze.

To think that a provocateur like Luis Buñuel once strode the earth, making his strange movies and even winning an Oscar for it, is to be endlessly comforted. As important a director as any on this list, Buñuel crafted silent-era Surrealist stunners, antireligious parables and witty modern satires with unsurpassed elegance. At the peak of his output is this savage comedy of manners, basically about a group of snobs trying to have an uninterrupted meal. They fail.

Inarguably Yasujiro Ozu's crowning achievement, this Japanese family drama may seem, like the smiling geriatrics at its center, modest to a fault. But look past the deceptively simple camera setups and muted line readings, and you'll find one of the most emotionally devastating movies about old age and parenting ever made. Even more impressive is Ozu's complete exclusion of villainy—only flawed human beings, making the story that much more tragic.

Whether you've traveled this movie's Möbius-strip structure countless times or are stepping into its Nancy Drew–on-mescaline zone unaware of what joys await you, Jacques Rivette's breezy existential French comedy-mystery is a cinephile's wet dream. If we could take a lozenge and enter any movie, this would be it: roller-skating heroines! Cosmic punch lines about psychic cats! Boating! Few films have balanced intellectual musing about culture consumption and sheer, unadulterated fun with such playful panache.

Tired of playing his bumbling alter ego, Monsieur Hulot, France's silent clown Jacques Tati decided to lose him in the big city. This gargantuan comedy was the result: Ostensibly following Hulot to a job interview, the film poetically drifts between characters, finding pockets of humor and humanity in every corner of the frame. You never quite know where the laughs will be, which makes successive viewings as rewarding as the first.

The fraught relationship (to put it mildly) between German director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski produced two mesmerising films depicting men poisoned by hubris and going mad in the jungle that are frightful in their realism, probably because they were made by two men going mad in the jungle. Fitzcarraldo, about a rubber baron trying to lug a steamboat over a mountain in the Amazon, is the bigger spectacle. But Aguirre is the more intense experience, mostly because there’s no huge, distracting ship to contend with. It’s mostly just Kinski, as a brutish 16th century conquistador searching for the mythical city of El Dorado in the Peruvian rainforest, his face etched in a permanent scowl, looking like he wants to strangle the guy on the other side of the camera, then possibly leap through the screen and come after you. The final scene, of Kinski alone on a raft, his would-be empire reduced to a bunch of chattering squirrel monkeys, is one of the great visual statements in all of movies – the folly of human pride, summed up in a single arresting image. 

The Italian movie was received, first and foremost, as a visual masterpiece, the lushness of its 1930s Fascist decor captured by future Apocalypse Now cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. But far more subtly, director Bernardo Bertolucci smuggled in a daunting amount of psychology and intellectual heft to Alberto Moravia's tale of a high-ranking bureaucrat's secret decadence. Over the years, the film has come to represent the apotheosis of stylish political cinema.

In the hands of Belgium's Chantal Akerman, the drudgery of "women's work" and prostitution aren't that far removed from each other; each rigorous real-time chore and paid afternoon tryst that we see the title character perform moves viewers closer to an inevitable crack in Jeanne's facade. It's both a structuralist triumph and a stunning indictment of society's gender roles. Watching someone peeling potatoes has never seemed so compelling.

All of the dialogue is sung in Jacques Demy’s bleak, candy-colored musical, generally considered to be one of Catherine Deneuve’s loveliest turns and the director’s masterpiece (though some are even more moved by the duo’s follow-up, The Young Girls of Rochefort). It’s nothing short of an entirely new way to make a musical, and composer Michel Legrand's score effortlessly yanks tears.

In Max Ophüls's exhilarating romance, Danielle Darrieux is a debt-ridden countess who sells the title earrings gifted to her by husband Charles Boyer. They end up in the hands of an Italian baron (Vittorio De Sica), who also pursues her affections. Ophüls's hypnotically tracking camera prepares us for an inevitably tragic outcome. The lengthy, head-spinning dance sequence that traces the baron and the countess's doomed courtship is particularly masterful.

Odds are you’ve seen the moving final shot of this WWII drama, considered by many to be the first neorealist movie. (We won’t spoil it, but it involves Anna Magnani running down a street.) Imagine how affecting it is when seen in its original context, after 100 minutes of buildup. In an era of high studio craft, director Roberto Rossellini made a courageous stand for narrative cinema’s ability to capture immediacy and rawness.

Social standing matters more than patriotism or ideological differences in Jean Renoir’s enduring masterpiece, which depicts the various alliances and betrayals that occur among French prisoners-of-war and their German captors during WWI. Many war movies followed, some of them bellicose, some of them finely shaded. But none tap as deeply into the human dimension as this one.—

As explosive as ever, Gillo Pontecorvo's Italian-made thriller charts the guerrilla uprising against the colonial French in northern Africa, a war waged via rioting, street violence, assassinations and caf bombings. Technically, the movie is as gripping as any Hollywood blockbuster, putting its mark on everything from The French Connection to Michael Mann's The Insider. But it's a 2003 Pentagon screening of the film that spoke volumes to its undeniable authority.

Germany's Rainer Werner Fassbinder tore a feverish path through the world's art houses, making 40 films (and acting in nearly 40, too) before dying of a drug overdose at age 37. Such manic appetites led to a supremely uncompromising cinema, with more impact today than on its initial release. This movie, a tortured power game between a fashion designer and her younger, female model, has become a classic passive-aggressive text, a postmodern All About Eve.

Our highest-ranking film from the past three decades, Wong Kar-wai's tremulous near-romance should rightly take its place as one the signature works of atmospheric longing. At its core are two exquisitely beautiful people, rakish pulp writer Tony Leung and maritally alienated Maggie Cheung, who tentatively swirl around each other in a sweltering apartment complex in 1960s Hong Kong. Suffused with Christopher Doyle's lush color cinematography and the crooning voice of Nat King Cole, the movie celebrates style and passion in bloom.

Making the case for Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni will never be easy—he's a director who, very deliberately, told stories about how modern life robs your soul. And when his breakthrough film screened for the cognoscenti at Cannes, it was both applauded and ferociously booed. The booers were wrong. Pinned to its rough scenario about a yachting group of friends were the stirrings of a new cinematic vibration, that of onscreen detachment, fashionable flirtation and spiritual ennui. One of the vacationers goes missing, then the movie itself loses curiosity in the mystery, heightening our own sense of alarm. Antonioni, a proud feminist, loved his women, and the glorious Monica Vitti, starring out of her sadness, became a Mad Men–worthy icon of 1960s loneliness. The movie is still an adventure

The tradition-shattering innovations of the French New Wave don't belong to only Godard and Truffaut. Director Alain Resnais made his mark with this elegiac black-and-white masterpiece. Emmanuelle Riva plays a French woman in devastated present-day Hiroshima, whose affair with a Japanese man unlocks memories of her relationship with a German soldier. But that barely hints at the film's intoxicating aural-visual interplay, which collapses time and space with overwhelming virtuosity.

After pretty much inventing the idea of modern montage in silent classics like Battleship Potemkin, the filmmakers of the Soviet Union beat a sad retreat during the Stalinist era. Andrei Tarkovsky's colossal epic is about the nature of artistic freedom itself: The plot is loosely based on the life of a 15th-century Christian-icon painter whose work transcended politics. Naturally, Tarkovsky himself got into hot water, but his film—initially banned—was worth it.

Luis Buñuel never met a sacred cow he didn't want to grill into a medium-rare steak, and the director's all-out assault on his bête noire—Catholicism—is a virtual buffet of blasphemy. Invited back to Spain after a professional exile, the filmmaker rewarded Franco's government with a scathing tale of a saintly woman whose piety brings her endless pain. The movie's parody of The Last Supper alone was enough to warrant the Vatican banning the satire—which made Buñuel’s subsequent career revival and win at Cannes that year all the sweeter.

To call Carl Theodor Dreyer’s severe black-and-white classic a 17th-century tale of witchcraft oversells the scare factor a bit, but a pleasant elderly woman is, indeed, burned at the stake—not before wishing ill on her prosecuting pastor and his much younger second wife (already making eyes with his adult son). The rest of the film plays like an apocalyptic thriller, with lust, faith, family and ash swirling into a vortex.

A strong candidate for the '60s slyest piece of agitpop, Jean-Luc Godard's tribute to pulp fiction stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina as criminal lovers on the lam. But his pileup of quotations from Balzac and B movies isn't just suitable for a brain in a jar; this is the French provocateur at his most colorful (literally), contagiously jazzy and politically cacophonous. It's the key transitional work in a long career of engaged, enraged filmmaking.

If you’ve never seen an Indian film, it’s time to rectify that. The first installment in Satyajit Ray’s famed “Apu”  trilogy is a sober, reflective masterpiece about a poverty-stricken Bengali family. Wonderstruck and attuned to the smallest details, Ray’s trilogy is quiet and concentrated—especially Pather Panchali. It contains all the explosions of a blockbuster, but they detonate in the heart.

François Truffaut’s masterful debut, which introduces his recurring Antoine Doinel character (played over many years by Jean-Pierre Léaud), is one of the all-time great coming-of-age movies, and concludes with the most expressive freeze-frame in the history of the medium. For future filmmakers like Wes Anderson, Truffaut’s unsentimental empathy for the young would become a touchstone.

Much of the prestige (and, to be fair, the intimidation) that accrues around foreign films can be attributed to this towering Swedish classic—but it's not as difficult as you might think. Yes, our medieval Crusader hero (a sapling-young Max von Sydow) squares off against Death in a chuckleworthy chess match. Yet the brilliance of Ingmar Bergman's psychodrama comes in the way it turns its beard-stroking symbology into a gripping experience for anyone with a little curiosity.

In only 28 minutes, Chris Marker's dazzling sci-fi romance—set largely within the dreamscapes of a nuclear-war survivor—completely rewrites the rules. (Inception fans, get thee to a Netflix queue.) Almost completely composed of still photographs and narration, the French short begins with the destruction of Paris, then introduces a Vertigo-like bridge to a happier past through a vividly remembered tryst. Decades later, Terry Gilliam would remake this plot as the eerie Twelve Monkeys.

If film can be seen as a shared international language, then here's its most thrilling Rosetta stone. To make this Japanese tale of a wandering ronin, director Akira Kurosawa took inspiration from stately John Ford Westerns and Hollywood's seedy noirs of the 1940s. Having already revised the action landscape with 1954's The Seven Samurai, Kurosawa would now do so again: Yojimbo, a massive worldwide hit, was (illegally) remade into a little Italian picture called A Fistful of Dollars, thereby launching the careers of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood both.

Combining fictional tropes with documentary footage, Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami depicts/restages events surrounding the trial of a man arrested for impersonating famed director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (A Moment of Innocence). Dazzling in its day, Close-Up now seems prophetic for its fluid blending of realties. The entire cinema world took notice—as did, perhaps, a reality-TV producer or two.

Bong Joon-ho’s searingly stylish, endlessly twisty and bitterly funny rampage up and down the South Korean social ladder scored a historic Best Picture Oscar – the first ever for a foreign-language film – and confirmed what the so-called Bong Hive has known all along: The Seoul wunderkind is one of the best directors alive. Parasite is no fluke: This is a master working at the height of his powers, taking a scalpel to both the haves and the have-nots in an unforgiving narrative where nobody gets off the hook for their transgressions. Shot like a heist film with Hitchcockian overtones, it’s a work of singular brilliance and considerable bite that reveals a new secret with each viewing. 

Jean-Louis Trintignant (Amour, The Conformist) stars in the third of Éric Rohmer’s “Moral Tales,” as an intellectual inexplicably attracted to earthy Françoise Fabian. Rohmer turned conversation into a feast of ideas—and with this film, his minimalist craft and maximalist dialogue create a vibe you’ll recognize in everything from My Dinner with Andre and the work of Woody Allen, to Boyhood.

Most cine-snobs think of martial-arts movies as guilty pleasures fit only for grindhouses; they've obviously never seen King Hu's gorgeous chronicle of a Buddhist kung fu master in love. The undisputed poet laureate of wuxia films, Hu treats his genre material as if it were high art, balancing action and atmospherics in each battle. Ang Lee readily acknowledged borrowing liberally from this film's eerily quiet fight scenes and balletic bamboo standoffs for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Accept no substitutes.

It might seem odd to describe a nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust documentary as ‘simple’, but the elements that comprise Shoah are minimal: no archival footage or historical re-enactments, just the words and faces of the people who were there, and images of the sites as they looked at the time of filming, between 1974 and 1985. And yet, that is enough to make every minute essential. French director Claude Lanzmann has said he believes that any attempt to explain or understand such an atrocity is useless. His only goal was to get witnesses - survivors, perpetrators and bystanders - on record, to say what they saw and did, before it was too late. With their numbers rapidly dwindling, the value of his efforts grows with each passing year.

Ingmar Bergman enlisted a Swedish national treasure, director Victor Sjöström, to play a professor who takes a trip down memory lane en route to accepting an award for his distinguished career. This is one of Bergman’s absolute best, and while many seasoned fans eventually come to prefer The Seventh Seal or the harder-edged Persona, it’s still the best introduction to his expertise with actors.

Victor Erice’s first film, about a little girl who sees Frankenstein and goes in search of the monster, works both as a haunting mood piece and as a subtle critique of Franco-era Spanish lethargy. This is where movies like the Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth come from, but Spirit of the Beehive captures childhood imagination and loss of innocence best.

Tokyo’s notorious Ginza nightclub district is the setting for this melodrama maximized to the highest weepy factor, in which a widow working as a bar hostess is betrayed by various patriarchal figures around her. She’s played by the hypnotic Hideko Takamine—one of Japan’s greatest stars—and directed by Mikio Naruse, a filmmaker who, in a more just world, would be mentioned as frequently as Ozu, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi.

It’s possible to simply thrill at Alexander Sokurov’s unprecedented technical feat—an uninterrupted Steadicam shot lasting the entire picture, weaving in and out of the high-ceilinged rooms of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum and royal Winter Palace. But behind this ostensible stunt lurks a magnificent ghost story about Russia’s detachment from its own history.

Thou shalt not ignore the ethical toughness of Polish cinema. With this complex, modern-day take on the Ten Commandments, director Krzysztof Kieslowski (Three Colors: Blue) scored his most lasting achievement. Originally made for television, these ten short films found a global embrace as a stand-alone movie event, making gushing fans out of nobodies like Stanley Kubrick and introducing an audience to the rigors of perfectly plotted philosophical inquiries.

Some find this slow-moving tale of life in a brothel hypnotic and moving; others may feel as if they, like the characters onscreen, have taken way the hell too much opium. In either case, the overall vision of Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien is undeniable. With this one and others, he became a beacon for film lovers championing “difficult cinema”—which is just another way of saying rewarding for those with the patience.

South Korea's Hong Sang-soo wowed audiences with this woozy, Woody Allen–ish portrait of vacationing urbanites entangled in messy matters of the heart. A student hooks up with a local cop during a trip to the mountains. When the movie switches its focus to an adulterous college professor, you're left scratching your head—until Hong deftly reveals the connections. This was the movie that jump-started the modern South Korean New Wave, laying the groundwork for everything from Park Chan-wook's baroque thrillers (Oldboy) to Bong Joon-ho's subversive genre work (The Host).

Romania’s health-care system gets dragged through the mud in this mordant melodrama, about a man who’s literally killed by a hospital’s uncaring bureaucracy. Cristi Puiu's movie announced a New Wave for his country’s slow-and-low cinema, marked by sharply critical politics, languid pacing and a humane focus on Ceausescu’s downtrodden.

Whether you're an action fan or not, welcome to the most influential foreign film of the past 25 years. Hong Kong genius John Woo would go on to make even crazier cop sagas, but none with a more seismic impact on fully loaded cinema than this breakthrough, opening the door to a new school of kinetic mayhem. Suddenly, Woo's double-pistol showdowns were everywhere, inspiring the as-yet-to-break Quentin Tarantino and Hollywood at large.