The 15 Best Foreign Movies Ever Made, According to Letterboxd

Bong Joon-ho's class warfare thriller is probably the film that made more Americans comfortable with subtitles than any other in the last decade. It starts as a dark comedy and turns into something you will not see coming.

Park Chan-wook's revenge thriller is one of those films that people describe by saying "just watch it, don't read anything about it." The hallway fight scene alone is worth the price of admission, and the ending will stick with you whether you want it to or not.

Also from Park Chan-wook, this one is a layered con-and-seduction story set in Japanese-occupied Korea. Every time you think you have it figured out, the film reshuffles the deck. Stunning to look at and genuinely unpredictable.

Fernando Meirelles's portrait of growing up in a Rio de Janeiro favela is one of the most kinetic crime films ever made. It hits with the energy of a great American crime film but with a raw authenticity that Hollywood rarely manages.

Bong Joon-ho's earlier film follows two detectives investigating South Korea's first serial murder case. It builds dread slowly and lands a gut punch ending that Letterboxd users still argue about in the comments.

The Soviet World War II film that most war films are still trying to match. It follows a teenage boy through Nazi atrocities in Belarus, and it does not look away. Brutal, hallucinatory, and unlike anything Hollywood made on the same subject.

Celine Sciamma's slow-burn romance between a painter and her subject is the kind of film you feel more than you analyze. The pacing is deliberate, the ending is devastating, and it has one of the best final shots of the decade.

Three young men from the Paris suburbs spend 24 hours after a riot, and Mathieu Kassovitz shoots it in stark black and white that feels like it was made yesterday. The class tension is unresolved and intentional. It is angry in the best possible way.

If you want something that is crowd-pleasing without being soft, this is the one. A wealthy quadriplegic hires an ex-convict as a caretaker, and what follows is funny, warm, and genuinely moving. One of the most-watched foreign films in American households for a reason.

Luc Besson's crime thriller about a hitman who reluctantly takes in a young girl is part action film, part found-family story, part tragedy. Jean Reno and a very young Natalie Portman make it work in ways that should not work on paper.

Masaki Kobayashi's samurai film is actually a sharp takedown of feudal hypocrisy, disguised as a revenge story. It is methodical, patient, and then delivers one of the most cathartic third acts in all of Japanese cinema.

Akira Kurosawa made a kidnapping thriller that also works as a class study, split into two completely different halves that both pay off. If you liked the rich-versus-poor tension in Parasite, this is where a lot of that DNA started.

Edward Yang's four-hour coming-of-age film set in 1960s Taipei is the kind of film that serious cinephiles treat as a rite of passage. It is long and slow and absolutely worth it. The quiet devastation builds across hours, not minutes.

Roberto Benigni's Holocaust film starts as a screwball comedy and shifts into something almost unbearable in the best way. It is sentimental, yes, but it earns every single tear. This is the film people show family members to get them into foreign cinema.

Giuseppe Tornatore's love letter to movies and childhood is warm, nostalgic, and lands a final scene that has been making grown adults cry for 35 years. If you have ever loved a film, this one is about that feeling.