The top 50 foreign films of all time

Shoah (1985)

For some, there can't ever be too many documentaries about the Holocaust. But if the trend feels slightly tired, it's because there's no improving on this definitive effort, a nine-and-a-half-hour grand statement that wrecks audiences. Daringly, French director Claude Lanzmann completely avoided archival footage and re-creations, instead boring fully into several first-person interviews with three types of subjects: survivors, bystanders and perpetrators. The cumulative effect is massive and central to an appreciation of evil.—Joshua Rothkopf

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A Touch of Zen (1969)

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.—David Fear

My Night at Maud's (1969)

Can two people talking be cinematic? France's Éric Rohmer thought so—his incredible body of work hinges on the pleasures and profundities of conversation. This incisive, quietly devastating feature is the one to see, centering on a spirited chat between a stiff-backed Catholic-Marxist (Jean-Louis Trintignant, brilliantly self-righteous) and the free-spirited woman (Françoise Fabian, enticing in both speech and shape) who tries to seduce him.—Keith Uhlich

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Close-Up (1990)

Abbas Kiarostami's astounding hall-of-mirrors docudrama was a watershed for the then-burgeoning Iranian cinema. Based on a true story, it tells the tale of a con artist who passed himself off as a locally famous filmmaker. Further blurring the lines between fiction and reality, the writer-director enlisted everyone involved in the actual scam to act as themselves. If that sounds like bad reality TV, know that there's not a single sensationalist moment.—Keith Uhlich

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Yojimbo (1961)

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.—Joshua Rothkopf

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La Jetée (1962)

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.—Joshua Rothkopf

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The Seventh Seal (1957)

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.—Joshua Rothkopf

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The 400 Blows (1959)

François Truffaut's indelible first feature helped put the French New Wave on the map. The film chronicles the troubled existence of cocky teenager Antoine Doinel, beautifully played by the precocious Jean-Pierre Léaud, who would revisit the character over four more movies. Truffaut also captures the profound somberness of postwar France, which is brought home in a heartbreaking final freeze-frame of Antoine alone by the seaside.—Keith Uhlich

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Pather Panchali (1955)

The poetic splendors of Indian cinema came to the world's attention when writer-director Satyajit Ray debuted his lyrical first feature, which follows the eventful childhood of a poor Bengali boy named Apu. A film of tremendous sympathy and imagination (the visuals are like children's-book illustrations come to breathtaking life), its success allowed Ray to make two follow-ups, Aparajito and The World of Apu, thus creating the formidable Apu Trilogy.—Keith Uhlich

Pierrot le Fou (1965)

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.—David Fear

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