The top 50 foreign films of all time

The Earrings of Madame de... (1953)

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.—Keith Uhlich

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The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Catherine Deneuve's perky umbrella-shop employee loves Nino Castelnuovo's strapping car mechanic. So far, so familiar, except for one thing: Every line of star-crossed dialogue in this heartbreaking French romance is sung. The duo's Technicolor paradise is slowly undone by war, hidden pregnancy, parental disapproval and a rival suitor. By the film's devastating finale, Michel Legrand's incredible, influential score will have crescendoed its way straight to your tear ducts.—Keith Uhlich

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

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.—David Fear

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The Conformist (1970)

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.—Joshua Rothkopf

Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)

The first tempestuous collaboration between impassioned filmmaker Werner Herzog and holy terror Klaus Kinski has a variety of nightmarish making-of anecdotes (Herzog supposedly directed his star at gunpoint). But nothing eclipses the mesmerizing power of the German film itself, which follows a 16th-century conquistador on an ill-fated quest to El Dorado. The further he goes, the madder things get, as when Kinski proclaims his omnipotence before a pack of monkeys.—Keith Uhlich

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Playtime (1967)

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.—Keith Uhlich

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Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)

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.—David Fear

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Tokyo Story (1953)

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.—David Fear

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The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

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.—Joshua Rothkopf

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Rashomon (1950)

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.—David Fear

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