The top 50 foreign films of all time

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

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.—Keith Uhlich

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La Dolce Vita (1960)

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.—Joshua Rothkopf

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Persona (1966)

Ingmar Bergman once called his mind-blowing tale of a catatonic actress (Liv Ullmann) and the young caretaker (Bibi Andersson) who becomes her confidante a "poem of imagery." But though the film's cutting-edge compositions wormed their way into the cultural lexicon (its famous perpendicular two-shot would be aped ad infinitum), this doppelgnger drama is less a photographic portfolio than a first-rate Rorschach test for viewers. Do Ullmann and Andersson fuse into one, as the climactic close-up suggests? Were they already two halves of one whole to begin with? Who, exactly, is filming cinematographer Sven Nykvist filming the movie?!? (Seriously, he appears in the film as a cameraman.) Debates over this moving-picture puzzle's metacommentary and meanings still rage on, though the fact that Bergman's brainteaser remains a defining moment of '60s art-house cinema is indisputable.—David Fear

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

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.—Joshua Rothkopf

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8 (1963)

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.—David Fear

Breathless (1960)

Recently back in theaters for its 50th anniversary, Jean-Luc Godard's breezy riff on bad romance today enchants a whole new generation. But don't call it a "revival"—if ever a film was immortally alive, it's this one. So much of the movie's language has become standard: Raoul Coutard's handheld, streetwise camerawork; a cast of gorgeous main characters riffing on pop-culture detritus (hello, Pulp Fiction); the sexy allure of cultures in clash. Yet in the context of this list, the deepest impact of Breathless is its introduction of a vibrant, youthful Paris tooting with car horns, its store lights glowing in the twilight. Breathless is a passport to this city and its dreamers—and for that alone, the movie is emblematic of all that foreign cinema has to offer.—Joshua Rothkopf

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Sansho the Bailiff (1954)

"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.—David Fear

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L'Avventura (1960)

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.—Joshua Rothkopf

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The Rules of the Game (1939)

"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.—David Fear

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M (1931)

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.—Keith Uhlich

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