From 'Metropolis' to 'Parasite': 100 best international movies of all time

- Director: Jean Eustache
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 89
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 210 minutes

Young Frenchman Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) aimlessly navigates 1970s France, juggling a committed girlfriend and a woman he sees casually on the side. But when his girlfriend and lover eventually meet, the trio forms a dysfunctional love triangle, leading to unsustainable emotional conflicts. At the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, "The Mother and the Whore" took home the Grand Prix award.

- Directors: Ronit Elkabetz, Shlomi Elkabetz
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 115 minutes

Set in Israel, the story follows a woman seeking a divorce from a cruel husband but must contend with rabbinical law, which favors the will of men. The acclaimed drama, which examines a woman caught in a patriarchal system, is the third film in a series about fraught marriage. Ronit Elkabetz (who also stars in the lead role) co-directed "Gett," a co-production of Israel, Germany, and France, with her brother Shlomi Elkabetz. The result of their effort is what The New York Times called a "gripping cinema from start to finish."

- Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 7.5
- Runtime: 110 minutes

When tragedy strikes a young Japanese wife and new mother, she loses her husband, and her grief forces her into a reclusive solitude. That is until a widower attempts to befriend her and bring her back out into the world. "Marborosi" was the first narrative film from director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose previous work up until that point had been in documentary filmmaking.

- Director: Éric Rohmer
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 113 minutes

Éric Rohmer wrote and directed this third chapter in his themed quartet of films, "Tales of the Four Seasons." This summer entry takes place in a French resort town, where a young man meanders through his vacation waiting for his girlfriend to arrive and becomes loosely involved with two other women. Rohmer's style captures an aimless and ambiguous tone toward romance and love.

- Director: Luis Buñuel
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 7.4
- Runtime: 99 minutes

"Tristana" explores the power dynamics between the titular young woman (Catherine Deneuve) and the stifling, much older man she's sent to live with, who eventually becomes her husband. Luis Buñuel's sleek takedown of patriarchy uses a more reserved surrealist style and takes place in Toledo, Spain, around the early 1930s. French movie star Deneuve's lines were dubbed in Spanish, which still did not stop her from giving a moving performance.

- Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 119 minutes

Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda's sublime, mystical film centers on the afterlife, exploring the experiences of 22 newly arrived people who are asked to choose their most precious memory so it can be filmed before they move into the next realm. The film is a meditation on both the power of memory and the cinematic possibilities for capturing its essence.

- Director: Nora Fingscheidt
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 89
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 125 minutes

Nine-year-old Benni is a troubled child in Germany, frequently in and out of institutions over her uncontrollable, emotional outbursts—her mother doesn't even feel up to handling her daughter's behavior. But at one particular institution, Benni suddenly finds herself getting uncomfortably attached to a young male school companion. "System Crasher" was the German entry for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards in 2019; however, it did not receive a nomination.

- Director: Céline Sciamma
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 7.4
- Runtime: 73 minutes

After her grandmother dies, young Nelly helps her mother and father clean out her mother's childhood home. One day, Nelly finds a little girl her age building a treehouse in the woods out back. She leads Nelly on a strange and wonderful journey through memory. Director Céline Sciamma wrote this French fantasy script during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic and shot during the first wave of COVID-19 in the fall of 2020.

- Director: Josef von Sternberg
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 104 minutes

Marlene Dietrich rose to stardom as the domineering nightclub singer who cajoles a staid professor into being her stage-act clown. Director Josef von Sternberg steeps the proceedings with the style that characterizes early German expressionist cinema. Shadows and severe angles give a foreboding tension to the theme of untamed sexuality wreaking havoc.

- Director: Jean-Luc Godard
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 7.4
- Runtime: 103 minutes

Jean Pierre-Léaud stars as Paul, a young man who takes up a job as an interviewer for a market research company in Paris. He moves in with an aspiring singer and her two roommates and grows increasingly disillusioned with the commercialization of the world around him. Told through 15 disconnected vignettes, "Masculine Feminine" features the first credited acting role of French singer Chantal Goya.

- Director: Wong Kar-wai
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 7.4
- Runtime: 94 minutes

Wong Kar-wai is one of Hong Kong's major directors, renowned for his vibrant, dreamlike visual style that brings epic emotional scope to the everyday lives of his characters. "Days of Being Wild" is an early career drama that follows a listless young man searching for his birth mother while stringing along women vying for his heart.

- Director: Laurent Cantet
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 7.5
- Runtime: 128 minutes

"The Class" won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, garnering critical acclaim for its vibrant, realistic depiction of the relationship between a teacher and his students over a year. The film was cast with actual students from the Paris school where it's set, in a neighborhood with a multiracial population.

- Director: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 179 minutes

A widowed Japanese stage actor and director seeks a chauffeur for his car while he takes on work directing a new play. He has initial misgivings about the woman appointed to him, 20-something Misaki, but the two slowly form a special bond. The film's title references the Beatles' song of the same name, which director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi had wanted to use; however, getting permission to use the song proved too difficult.

- Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 85
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 131 minutes

This French thriller is set in a fictional and remote Latin American town where villagers live in squalor, exploited by the American oil company based there. The film is famous for edge-of-your-seat suspense as truck drivers—hired for a dangerous mission—travel over rough terrain with loads of nitroglycerin. The film captures the futility of living under capitalism and provided the template for action films with a bomb-on-board plotline.

- Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 92 minutes

After only six months of marriage, Karol's wife leaves him because he is impotent. Suddenly without his marriage or job, Karol is forced to leave France and plots a way to return to his home country of Poland, where he can start a new life. "Three Colors: White" is the second film in director Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colors Trilogy," bookended by "Three Colors: Blue" and "Three Colors: Red."

- Director: Ingmar Bergman
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 86
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 83 minutes

Ingmar Bergman's "Persona" is emblematic art cinema drenched with ambiguous psychological theory and filled with symbolic imagery. Liv Ullmann stars as an actor who has stopped talking, and Bibi Andersson plays the nurse who is to care for her at a Swedish coastal cottage. Surreal visuals use shadows and mirror shots to depict the two women as doubles, perhaps suggestive of a single character or a split feminine psyche.

- Director: Abdellatif Kechiche
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 180 minutes

Adapted from a graphic novel, "Blue is the Warmest Colour" explores the relationship between two French teenagers, a shy high schooler and an art student with blue hair. The film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, though it was surrounded by controversy during its release. Lead actors Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos reported grueling and abusive set conditions, and director Abdellatif Kechiche was criticized for objectifying female bodies and sexuality.

- Director: Hayao Miyazaki
- Stacker score: 90.76
- Metascore: 86
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 86 minutes

Considered one of the greatest animated films of all time, "My Neighbor Totoro" takes place in the Japanese countryside during the late 1950s, following two young sisters who intermingle with fantastical spirits they meet in their home and the nearby woods. The enchanting, visionary film by Hayao Miyazaki captures the wonders and difficulties of childhood through an encounter with the forest king, Totoro, who resembles an adorable, enormous plush toy.

- Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Stacker score: 91.30
- Metascore: 89
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 115 minutes

Hirokazu Kore-eda's elegiac, wistful family drama pulls audiences into a Japanese household still contending with a death 12 years after it happened. Kore-eda is known for his immersion in the everyday details of the worlds his characters inhabit. Here, the remaining adult children return to the home of their elderly parents to mark the anniversary of the death of their oldest brother, who drowned trying to save another boy who, now grown, also comes to visit.

- Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Stacker score: 91.30
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 141 minutes

Hirokazu Kore-eda's somber drama is based on a true story and explores the plight of four abandoned children living in a Tokyo apartment. After their mother leaves, the kids have to fend for themselves and evade the landlord in this affecting and emotional film that focuses on the quiet moments of their harrowing plight.

- Director: Costa-Gavras
- Stacker score: 91.30
- Metascore: 86
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 127 minutes

In this political thriller, a leftist agitator is killed under suspicious circumstances—a standard traffic death seems unlikely given the political climate and the victim. As the facts slowly reveal themselves, those who tell the truth are punished in this film that skewers the Greek government of the 1960s. The film is based on Vassilis Vassilikos' 1967 novel of the same name, about the 1963 assassination of Greek politician Gregoris Lambrakis.

- Director: Louis Malle
- Stacker score: 91.30
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 104 minutes

In Nazi-occupied France, two young boys develop a close bond despite their differences while at a Catholic boarding school. However, Julien doesn't realize that his new friend, Jean, is a Jew seeking refuge from the Holocaust and that the school's headmaster is working to protect him. The film is semi-autobiographical, based in part on a disturbing experience from director Louis Malle's own childhood. The film won the Golden Lion at the 1987 Venice Film Festival.

- Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev
- Stacker score: 91.30
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 140 minutes

This bleak and brooding drama takes place in a coastal town near the Barents Sea, where local politics simmer with an underbelly of corruption. Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev infuses his film with poetics of the ordinary which includes whale bones on a beach and blighted properties. "Leviathan" follows one family's attempt to save their home as they tangle with the local courts amid a bureaucratic nightmare.

- Director: Sylvain Chomet
- Stacker score: 91.30
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 80 minutes

This jazz-fueled animated film features a charming visual style and an original score by Benoît Charest, who was nominated along with French writer-director Sylvain Chomet for an Academy Award for Best Original Song, "Belleville Rendez-vous." The story follows a grandmother who joins up with the famed jazz-singing triplets on an odyssey to find her grandson, who's been kidnapped while competing in the Tour de France.

- Director: Joachim Trier
- Stacker score: 91.30
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 7.8

Fickle Julie is a medical student living in Oslo when she decides to change her career path—then, she does it again, and again, and again. Battling uncertainty, indecisiveness, romance, tragedy, and heartbreak, "The Worst Person in the World" follows Julie's struggle to discover herself and her career path across four years of her late twenties into her thirties. The film was nominated for two Oscars in 2022, including Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film.

- Director: Jacques Audiard
- Stacker score: 91.30
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 155 minutes

This co-production between France and Italy takes the familiar prison drama and its intrigue to new heights. A young French Algerian, Malik (Tahar Rahim), who can neither read nor write, gets a six-year sentence and finds himself embroiled between rival convict factions. Malik is soon pulled into the Corsican mob in charge and rises in their ranks.

- Director: Wong Kar-wai
- Stacker score: 91.30
- Metascore: 87
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 98 minutes

Wong Kar-wai's elegiac, gorgeously rendered romance is a masterpiece of love and longing. A man and a woman who live in the same apartment complex discover that their spouses are having an affair and then fall for one another. Set in 1960s Hong Kong, costumes and set details evoke the beauty of the era while also expressing lurking emotions beneath the lush surface color.

- Director: Michel Hazanavicius
- Stacker score: 91.30
- Metascore: 89
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 100 minutes

1920s movie star George Valentin falls in love with a rising star named Peppy Miller, who loves him back. The only problem: George is married. As a new age begins to dawn over the film industry, the two lovers find themselves further torn apart as George's silent films fade into obscurity and Peppy finds success with sound. A production of France, director Michel Hazanavicius's homage to the silent era of Hollywood won Best Picture at the 84th Academy Awards.

- Director: François Truffaut
- Stacker score: 91.85
- Metascore: 94
- IMDb user rating: 7.5
- Runtime: 83 minutes

François Truffaut's haunting debut "The 400 Blows" inaugurated the French New Wave film movement with its chronicle of a young juvenile delinquent. Truffaut returns to the emotionally harrowing experiences of youth and adolescence in "The Wild Child." It explores the Tarzan-like history of a young boy found in the woods in 1798 who is then gradually socialized into French society.

- Director: Robert Bresson
- Stacker score: 91.85
- Metascore: 95
- IMDb user rating: 7.4
- Runtime: 85 minutes

French auteur Robert Bresson was 80 years old when he directed this spare, contemplative drama based on a Leo Tolstoy novella that examines the soul of criminality. The film follows a random but harrowing series of events in which an otherwise average family man gets pulled into a crime, is convicted, and then proceeds further down what seems an inevitably dark path.

- Director: Elio Petri
- Stacker score: 91.85
- Metascore: 89
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 115 minutes

Elio Petri's critically acclaimed Italian police thriller is both a how-to on getting away with murder and a scathing critique of institutional corruption. After a detective kills his mistress, he's put in charge of the case in this taut, stylish drama that investigates a crime and Italy's systems of power.

- Director: Jean-Luc Godard
- Stacker score: 91.85
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 95 minutes

"Band of Outsiders" follows two young men who enlist Odile (Anna Karina) in a hapless robbery. Lead actor Anna Karina was married to director Jean-Luc Godard during the production of this iconic French New Wave-style film, and it shows with multiple shots featuring his muse.

- Director: Isao Takahata
- Stacker score: 91.85
- Metascore: 89
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 137 minutes

Dazzling hand-drawn animation combines the minimalism of watercolor illustrations with soaring movement to give this adaptation of a Japanese folktale captivating magic. A young princess with otherworldly origins experiences earthly adventures, both commonplace and epic, before she is called back to a prior home. Isao Takahata's enchanting tale features a devastating and beautiful farewell.

- Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
- Stacker score: 91.85
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 196 minutes

Nuri Bilge Ceylan sets his long, dark story (adapted from works by Anton Chekhov) in Türkiye's Cappadocia mountains during the onset of winter. The setting provides a thematic chill as the drama plays out between a wealthy hotel-owning landlord and a tenant who lashes out after he falls behind on rent.

- Director: Ingmar Bergman
- Stacker score: 91.85
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 91 minutes

At the end of his life, a curmudgeonly professor takes a road trip to receive a late-career honor and, on the way, takes a nostalgic journey through his past. Considered a masterpiece of Swedish cinema, the film features dream revelries exploring the psychology of the human condition and uses memory as a key entry point.

- Director: Ingmar Bergman
- Stacker score: 91.85
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 96 minutes

In medieval Sweden, plagued by the Black Death, a disillusioned knight returns home from the Crusades and makes a deal with Death: beat Death in a chess match, and win his life. The iconic look of Bengt Ekerot's portrayal of Death was replicated in "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey" and "Bill & Ted Face the Music."

- Director: Yasujirô Ozu
- Stacker score: 92.39
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 100 minutes

When their father gets a promotion, two young brothers move to Tokyo and become the leaders of a local gang after beating a bully. But the children's ideas of power get a rude awakening after they witness their father at the hands of his tyrannical boss. Ozu's classic black-and-white, silent comedy was loosely remade by Ozu himself, with his 1959 film "Good Morning."

- Director: Chantal Akerman
- Stacker score: 92.39
- Metascore: 94
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 202 minutes

In this paradigm of slow cinema, widowed housewife and mother Jeanne Dielman finds ways to pass the time in her home in Brussels, doing menial chores and errands and occasional sex work on the side. But slight changes in Jeanne's routine domino to an irrevocable climax. Chantal Akerman's film recently clinched the top spot in the esteemed 2022 Sight & Sound "Greatest Films of All Time" poll.

- Director: Akira Kurosawa
- Stacker score: 92.39
- Metascore: 89
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 126 minutes

In 16th-century Japan, during tribal warfare, two peasants take up the task of escorting a man and woman across enemy lines in exchange for gold. The peasants don't know that the pair is actually a general and a princess, and the general must maintain his hidden identity while fighting foes along the way. Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress" was the loose basis for "Star Wars: A New Hope."

- Directors: Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi
- Stacker score: 92.39
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 96 minutes

A co-production of France and the United States, "Persepolis" adapts the hit graphic novel of the same name by Marjane Satrapi, who also co-directed this animated film. Satrapi's autobiographical story follows her riveting experience growing up during the Iranian Revolution. The animated style resembles a living comic book rendered in stark but dramatic black-and-white images.

- Director: Wolfgang Petersen
- Stacker score: 92.39
- Metascore: 86
- IMDb user rating: 8.4
- Runtime: 149 minutes

This influential submarine thriller captures the claustrophobic isolation of German World War II soldiers who endure harrowing combat missions and mishaps. The film's success launched German filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen as a major director of Hollywood action movies, including the ocean-set thrillers "The Perfect Storm" and "Poseidon."

- Director: Yasujirô Ozu
- Stacker score: 92.93
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 113 minutes

In Tokyo, a newly widowed husband and father must balance his relationships with his three children: his eldest, who is married; his middle child, who feels obligated to care for him; and a younger son. Ultimately, the father feels his middle child should not need to spend her life caring for him, and he sets out to arrange a marriage for her. "An Autumn Afternoon" was director Yasujirô Ozu's last film, and he died the following year on his 60th birthday.

- Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
- Stacker score: 92.93
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 140 minutes

Recently released from prison, French criminal Corey is quickly pulled back into the criminal underworld with the promise of riches through a jewel heist. Teaming up with an escaped murderer and an alcoholic policeman, Corey pursues the heist; meanwhile, the murderer is tailed by the police commissioner who lost Corey's murderous partner. The film's climactic heist sequence is about 30 minutes long and contains almost no dialogue.

- Directors: Jean Cocteau, René Clément
- Stacker score: 92.93
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 93 minutes

This French adaptation of the well-known fairy tale offers an enchanting and visually sumptuous production design. Black-and-white cinematography takes on a surrealist edge in this technically masterful story about a woman imprisoned by a monstrous beast who then falls in love with her. The film is known for its stirring, poignant romance and depth that goes well beyond a child's story.

- Director: Luis Buñuel
- Stacker score: 92.93
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 102 minutes

Spanish director Luis Buñuel is arguably the originator of cinematic surrealism, infusing his films with a dizzying clash of strange symbols and dreamlike interludes. "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for France. The film is an elaborate, surrealist take on upper-crust friends trying in vain to have dinner that takes a detour into bizarre and subversive revelry.

- Director: Masaki Kobayashi
- Stacker score: 92.93
- Metascore: 85
- IMDb user rating: 8.6
- Runtime: 133 minutes

Masaki Kobayashi's masterpiece set in 17th-century feudal Japan features striking widescreen compositions that depict the rebellion beneath a staid tradition of samurai rules and conventions. Intense violence and arresting fight scenes surround the tragedy of a family caught up in the upheaval within a brutal regime reliant on the suicidal practice of Harakiri.

- Director: Anurag Kashyap
- Stacker score: 92.93
- Metascore: 89
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 321 minutes

Released in two parts due to its over-five-hour running time, this popular, innovative spectacle of Indian cinema offers a revision of the gangster genre that references both classic and contemporary movies in its kinetic, colorful style. Exuberant long takes, vibrant action scenes, and ultra-violence accompany this mafia revenge tale set across 70 years.

- Directors: Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky
- Stacker score: 93.48
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 145 minutes

The Hungarian husband-wife auteur team of Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky creates another strange masterpiece made up of long takes and somber black-and-white cinematography instilled with a philosophy of politics. "Werckmeister Harmonies" is set in a small European village where a circus comes to town with a giant embalmed whale in tow, eventually inciting violent riots.

- Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Stacker score: 93.48
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 121 minutes

Set in the lesser-seen, impoverished districts of Toyko, Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Shoplifters" follows a family who relies on petty theft to support their existence. They take in a young child who's being abused, and this act upturns their world. The Japanese film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Festival, renowned for its striking emotional inquiry into what makes a family.

- Director: Jacques Rivette
- Stacker score: 94.02
- Metascore: 100
- IMDb user rating: 7.3
- Runtime: 193 minutes

In this surreal French film by the great Jacques Rivette, two women are entangled by pure chance, becoming increasingly involved in one another's lives until they're sharing an apartment and swapping one another's identities. At the center of it all is a strange house, a murdered girl, and a mystery the two women must solve together. The film contains references to multiple pieces of literature, including Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and Henry James' "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes."

- Director: Roberto Rossellini
- Stacker score: 94.02
- Metascore: 100
- IMDb user rating: 7.3
- Runtime: 97 minutes

Roberto Rossellini was a master of the Italian neorealist cinema, but in this drama, he turned to an upper-crust British couple on holiday in Naples who drift apart. Critics found it a modern transformation of the director's previous style into a work that explores the mysterious inner lives of the married couple at its center.

- Director: Masaki Kobayashi
- Stacker score: 94.02
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 8.3
- Runtime: 128 minutes

Set in feudal Japan in 1725, director Masaki Kobayashi's family drama explores the rigid injustice of social systems and the price for rebelling against them. A lord first demands that a samurai's son marry his cast-off concubine, but then demands her return after the couple has fallen in love. Stunning black-and-white cinematography conveys this world's oppressive structure, as well as the passion of those who choose to defy it.

- Director: Akira Kurosawa
- Stacker score: 94.02
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 8.3
- Runtime: 185 minutes

An aspiring physician completes medical school and takes up a job in a small, rural clinic, working under the village doctor Red Beard. Though the young physician had wanted an easy job working for the wealthy, Red Beard proves a wise teacher and introduces the young man to the human aspect of medicine. "Red Beard" was the last collaboration between director Akira Kurosawa and actor Toshirô Mifune after making 16 films together.

- Director: Louis Malle
- Stacker score: 94.02
- Metascore: 94
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 91 minutes

French director Louis Malle's debut film, a crime thriller with a soundtrack Miles Davis and his crew improvised over two days, imbues film noir with a jazz edge. An adulterous couple plots a murderous scheme that leaves one of them locked in an elevator in scenes that teem with claustrophobic suspense. One thing after another goes awry as the crimes go from bad to worse on a twisting path toward doom.

- Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
- Stacker score: 94.02
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 167 minutes

Andrei Tarkovsky's science fiction art film set on a space station is considered a masterpiece of Russian cinema. A psychologist travels to a space station to investigate strange occurrences and soon finds himself caught up in the weirdness. His long-dead wife shows up, along with other baffling occurrences, in this contemplative drama that uses the isolation and mysteries of space to consider human experience, the nature of reality and perception, and memory.

- Director: Federico Fellini
- Stacker score: 94.02
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 138 minutes

At the height of his career, an Italian filmmaker finds himself in a creative slump while trying to make a new movie, and he decides to get away at a luxurious resort. There, he seeks refuge in his fantastical thoughts of past loves and childhood but finds that the troubles of his reality are not far behind him. A co-production between Italy and France, the avant-garde comedy-drama was nominated for five Academy Awards in 1964, taking home Best Foreign Language Film and Best Costume Design, Black-and-White.

- Director: Alfonso Cuarón
- Stacker score: 94.02
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 135 minutes

Alfonso Cuarón's semi-autobiographical film is loosely based on his own childhood experience growing up during the civil unrest in 1970s Mexico City. Yalitza Aparicio was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her debut performance as the live-in housekeeper of an affluent household in a film that explores class.

- Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
- Stacker score: 94.02
- Metascore: 89
- IMDb user rating: 8.4
- Runtime: 137 minutes

German writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's film debut concerns the Stasi East German police, who spied on those deemed a threat to the state, especially artists. Set in 1980s East Berlin, this dramatic thriller creates a pervasive tension as it exposes the secrets of spies and those they surveil.

- Director: Edward Yang
- Stacker score: 94.57
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 8.3
- Runtime: 237 minutes

Edward Yang is a quintessential director of the Taiwanese New Wave cinema movement known for its stylistic innovations and political content specific to Tawainese identity and history. "A Brighter Summer Day," set in 1960s Taiwan and based on a true event, follows a teenage boy caught up in gang life who murders his girlfriend. Yang's captivating realist style uses long takes to create a mesmerizing and affective tragedy.

- Director: Abbas Kiarostami
- Stacker score: 94.57
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 98 minutes

Combining fiction with documentary, this film from Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami plays out a real incident of identity theft with the real people who were a part of it. Hossain pretends to be filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who is supposedly looking to film the wealthy Ahankhahs—until Hossain's scheme is uncovered and he's arrested for charges of fraud. The film is considered a masterwork and made #17 on the Sight & Sound's Greatest Films of All Time poll.

- Director: Marco Tullio Giordana
- Stacker score: 94.57
- Metascore: 89
- IMDb user rating: 8.5
- Runtime: 366 minutes

Originally intended as a miniseries for Italian television, "The Best of Youth" clocks in at six hours long. However, critics found it to be an enthralling drama that earns its length as it follows two brothers across four decades. The two men clash in ideals and careers in a surprisingly engrossing melodrama that explores the divisions and connections in families.

- Director: Vittorio De Sica
- Stacker score: 94.57
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 89 minutes

Vittorio De Sica's masterpiece of the Italian neorealist cinema examines the plight of an elderly man, Umberto, and his dog adrift in a social system with no means to support them. The film features long takes of the details of everyday existence as Umberto gets evicted from the room he rents, then is discharged from a hospital, finding himself without options to survive.

- Director: François Truffaut
- Stacker score: 94.57
- Metascore: 97
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 105 minutes

The film follows two friends, Jules and Jim, who fight for opposite sides during World War I and fall for the same enigmatic woman, Catherine. Jeanne Moreau plays the woman at the center of one of the quintessential cinematic love triangles. François Truffaut, a major director of the French New Wave, uses elements such as handheld shots, freeze frames, roving pans, newsreel footage, and superimposition to create a sense of vivid yet ethereal realism in this film.

- Director: Akira Kurosawa
- Stacker score: 94.57
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 8.4
- Runtime: 143 minutes

In this Japanese film noir, a chauffeur's son is kidnapped by mistake and held for ransom. The chauffeur's boss, a wealthy shoe company executive, is the victim of this extortion plan. Starring Akira Kurosawa's oft-collaborator Toshirô Mifune, "High and Low" was loosely based on Ed McBain's 1959 novel "King's Ransom."

- Director: Michael Haneke
- Stacker score: 94.57
- Metascore: 95
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 127 minutes

Michael Haneke's "Amour" won numerous major awards, including the Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. A co-production of France, Austria, and Germany, it explores the relationship between an elderly couple after one of them has a series of debilitating strokes.

- Director: Julien Duvivier
- Stacker score: 95.11
- Metascore: 98
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 94 minutes

Julien Duvivier's atmospheric romance occurs in the dark, twisting alleys and porticos of the Casbah district of Algiers, a gritty, labyrinthine world where the gangster Pépé holes up to evade police. Pépé falls for a mysterious woman, but love leads to downfall. Duvivier's style emerged as part of the Poetic Realism movement in French film that later influenced the doomed characters and bleak themes of film noir.

- Director: Yasujirô Ozu
- Stacker score: 95.11
- Metascore: 94
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 125 minutes

In postwar Tokyo, Noriko is 28 and still single, but she lives a happy life nonetheless with her extended family. However, that same family would prefer Noriko get married. When she's proposed to by her father's older business associate, Noriko finds her heart torn in two directions as her now-widowed childhood friend also reappears in her life. As with a number of Ozu's postwar films, "Early Summer" examines rifts between family generations and the increased independence of women.

- Director: Yasujirô Ozu
- Stacker score: 95.11
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 108 minutes

Noriko is a young, single woman living with her widowed father. She is perfectly happy with the pair's arrangement and has no plans to marry. Her father, however, begins to worry about his only child being alone for her whole life and attempts to arrange a marriage between her and a suitor. "Late Spring" is the first film in Ozu's "Noriko Trilogy," succeeded by "Early Summer" and "Tokyo Story," all of which star unique versions of the character of Noriko, played by Setsuko Hara.

- Director: Edward Yang
- Stacker score: 95.11
- Metascore: 94
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 173 minutes

Edward Yang, an auteur of the Taiwanese New Wave film movement, won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for his intimate, detailed look at the everyday lives of three generations of a family in Taipei. The drama unfolds unhurriedly as a father of two endures problems at work, a mother-in-law in a coma, and a wife in a midlife crisis—all presented in a gentle, droll, and deeply affecting style.

- Director: Federico Fellini
- Stacker score: 95.11
- Metascore: 95
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 174 minutes

There are several iconic scenes in Federico Fellini's rhapsody on hedonism and excess, including the fountain frolic and the opening sequence where a statue of Jesus dangles from a helicopter. Marcello Mastroianni plays a tabloid columnist moving through a series of surreal vignettes across Rome in an exploration of love and celebrity that upends film conventions.

- Director: Akira Kurosawa
- Stacker score: 95.11
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 8.3
- Runtime: 143 minutes

Kanji Watanabe has worked in a tedious, bureaucratic position for most of his life when he suddenly receives a terminal diagnosis. With his end in sight, he attempts to live out his remaining days as meaningfully as possible and looks to build a new playground in an impoverished neighborhood. The screenplay, co-penned by director Kurosawa alongside Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, was partly based on Leo Tolstoy's 1886 novella "The Death of Ivan Ilyich."

- Director: Akira Kurosawa
- Stacker score: 95.11
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 110 minutes

In feudal Japan, an anonymous ronin wanders into a small village, where he takes it upon himself to insert himself into a squabble between two local businessmen. Going by the name Sanjuro Kuwabatake, the ronin plays both sides, convincing both men to hire him as a bodyguard. His intervention sets in motion an eventual gang war. Italian director Sergio Leone remade "Yojimbo" as "A Fistful of Dollars," starring Clint Eastwood, in 1964, leaving out Akira Kurosawa in the credits, which led to a lawsuit that was reportedly settled out of court.

- Director: Robert Bresson
- Stacker score: 95.65
- Metascore: 98
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 95 minutes

French director Robert Bresson's cinematic ode to the life of a donkey, Balthazar, seems an unlikely subject for critical acclaim. Bresson uses a stark and direct style where "au hasard" or "at random" encounters are both brutal and compassionate. The film achieves a poetic presentation of the human condition that evades the sentimental, despite exploring these themes through an animal's perspective.

- Director: F.W. Murnau
- Stacker score: 95.65
- Metascore: 95
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 94 minutes

A farmer, bored with his domestic life, falls for a flirtatious young woman, and together they plot to murder his wife. When his wife discovers the nefarious plan, she runs away—but she's pursued by her husband, and the two of them slowly rediscover their affection for one another. The first American production from German director F.W. Murnau, "Sunrise" took home the Oscar for Unique and Artistic Picture (a category which no longer exists) at the first-ever Academy Awards ceremony in 1929.

- Director: Sergei Eisenstein
- Stacker score: 95.65
- Metascore: 97
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 66 minutes

A dramatization of a real-life mutiny that occurred on a Russian naval ship in 1905, the sailors of the Potemkin revolt against their inhumane conditions. The result is a wide-scale public uprising, leading to a massacre of civilians by police. A sequence in the film known as "The Odessa Steps" is regarded as one of the most influential scenes in all of film history.

- Director: Cristian Mungiu
- Stacker score: 95.65
- Metascore: 97
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 113 minutes

Cristian Mungiu's searing, minimalist thriller-of-the-everyday became the first Romanian film to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Set in 1987 in communist Romania, the story follows what two college-age women go through when one of them seeks an abortion in a country where it's illegal. Cinematography focuses on the stark details of an oppressive world seen through intimate long takes.

- Director: Céline Sciamma
- Stacker score: 95.65
- Metascore: 95
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 122 minutes

Céline Sciamma's mesmerizing love story creates a new cinematic language, one that explores a female gaze that reinvents what it means for women both to look and be looked at beyond the conventions of male objectification. Set in late 18th-century France, an artist, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), is commissioned to paint the portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). The painting, meant for a groom whom Héloïse has never met, becomes a subversive and romantic project for the two.

- Director: Jacques Tati
- Stacker score: 96.20
- Metascore: 99
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 155 minutes

This film features director Jacques Tati's popular character Monsieur Hulot, whom Tati also portrays. In this picture—the most expensive French movie made at the time—Hulot finds himself bewildered by an increasingly technologized Paris as he stumbles through a world that seems alien to him. His journey mirrors that of an American tourist, whom he grows fond of as they sporadically meet.

- Director: Jasmila Zbanic
- Stacker score: 96.20
- Metascore: 97
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 101 minutes

In Bosnia in 1995, a schoolteacher and her family are displaced when the Serbian army takes over their town. Seeking shelter with many others at a U.N. camp, Aida proves a crucial component in untangling what future lies in store for her family and her people. "Quo Vadis, Aida?" dramatizes the events that took place during the Srebrenica massacre, led by a convicted Bosnian Serbian war criminal.

- Director: Gillo Pontecorvo
- Stacker score: 96.20
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 121 minutes

Using the stylistic tenets of the Italian neorealist film movement, "The Battle of Algiers" is shot in black-and-white with nonprofessional actors to achieve a sense of documentary reality in depicting the history of the Algerian War of Independence from the French government. It was a joint production between Italy and Algeria and was initially banned in France.

- Director: Jean Renoir
- Stacker score: 96.74
- Metascore: 99
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 110 minutes

French director Jean Renoir's critique of French society follows multiple couples and the affairs that they're having, some aristocratic and some very much not. During a weekend getaway at a marquis' country chateau, these secret passions collide and are disquietingly laid bare.

- Director: Jules Dassin
- Stacker score: 96.74
- Metascore: 97
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 118 minutes

Jules Dassin, an American blacklisted during the McCarthy era, directed the influential heist film "Rififi" in France. This bleak, dread-soaked caper includes a suspenseful play-by-play break-in that requires meticulous safecracking. The criminal gang, each member with their own expertise, looks to pull off that one final job, but nothing goes as planned.

- Director: Asghar Farhadi
- Stacker score: 96.74
- Metascore: 95
- IMDb user rating: 8.3
- Runtime: 123 minutes

The first Iranian film to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar is also one of the great films about divorce. Asghar Farhadi's drama opens with the broken couple (Leila Hatami and Payman Maadi) directly addressing both the camera and a family court judge. The audience is pulled into a tense and intimate world where it's impossible to choose sides in the complicated dispute that unfolds with the couple's young daughter, who is caught in the middle.

- Director: Marcel Carné
- Stacker score: 97.28
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 8.3
- Runtime: 189 minutes

"Children of Paradise" was shot on soundstages during the restrictive Vichy regime during World War II and is considered an achievement in French studio filmmaking. The film is a long, epic costume drama set in the 1830s with a style that is traditional and straightforward with stagy, affected performances. It's filled with subversive subtext as it follows a beguiling woman with four suitors, each with their own agenda.

- Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
- Stacker score: 97.28
- Metascore: 100
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 113 minutes

Italian auteur Bernardo Bertolucci infuses his drama about conformity with stylish, color-rich cinematography that captures 1930s Italy, where an assassin, Marcello, is sent to kill his outspoken, antifascist former professor. Bertolucci's nonlinear narrative moves across Marcello's life to explore how his obsession with acceptance contributes to his fascist sympathies and easy betrayals.

- Director: Akira Kurosawa
- Stacker score: 97.28
- Metascore: 97
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 162 minutes

Akira Kurosawa reimagined Shakespeare's "King Lear" as a drama between a warrior king and his three sons in 16th-century Japan. "Ran" brings the conflict to the battlefield in sweeping combat spectacles that show the renowned director's technical prowess. The bleak themes of the original play become even more epic as the kingdom fractures with grand cinematic beauty.

- Director: Isao Takahata
- Stacker score: 97.28
- Metascore: 94
- IMDb user rating: 8.5
- Runtime: 89 minutes

"Grave of the Fireflies" is a haunting tearjerker revered for bringing human depth to animated characters. This Japanese film follows two siblings in the aftermath of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The two struggle as they make their way through landscapes, both harsh and fantastical, to capture the tragic, heart-wrenching experience of its young heroes.

- Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
- Stacker score: 97.83
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 8.4
- Runtime: 124 minutes

Set in the Heian period of feudal Japan, a governor is forced into exile. His wife and children are separated on their journey to join him. Along the way, the mother is forced into being a courtesan, and the children are sold into slavery. After a decade of growing up enduring a life of oppression and hardship, the children discover their mother may yet be alive. Kenji Mizoguchi's film is based on Mori Ōgai's 1915 short story, which was itself based on an old folktale.

- Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
- Stacker score: 97.83
- Metascore: 99
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 145 minutes

"Army of Shadows" was an obscure French masterpiece about resistance during World War II until it garnered a critical resurgence of attention upon its American release in 2006. Director Jean-Pierre Melville makes the proceedings unrelentingly bleak in this chilling depiction of betrayal and despair for those who resist the Nazi regime.

- Director: Luchino Visconti
- Stacker score: 97.83
- Metascore: 100
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 186 minutes

Opulent costumes and settings recreate 1860s Sicily, where an aristocratic family copes with the social changes threatening their dynasty. Burt Lancaster stars as the patriarch, a prince looking to protect his family's empire in an epic tale known for its sweeping scale and decadent beauty. "The Leopard" was screened in English in the U.S., and while Lancaster was filmed speaking English, he was later dubbed by an Italian voice actor, with awkward results.

- Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
- Stacker score: 97.83
- Metascore: 98
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 114 minutes

This silent era staple tells the classic story of the eponymous teenage warrior, Jeanne d'Arc, who faces trial for asserting that she spoke to God in 15th-century France. Subjected to horrific cruelty in order to change her story, Jeanne—mythologized as Joan of Arc—sticks to her truth and becomes a martyr in her execution. The film's resurgence is also something of a miracle. Its theatrical cut and a subsequent cut were both lost in separate fires. It wasn't until 1981, when a janitor was cleaning out a closet at a Norweigan mental hospital, that Dreyer's original version of the film was found—missing but in pristine condition after 50 years.

- Director: Akira Kurosawa
- Stacker score: 97.83
- Metascore: 98
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 88 minutes

One of the most influential Japanese films of all time, "Rashomon," is most famous for its narrative structure and the way it calls point of view into question. Locals try to make sense of a crime in feudal-era Japan, with details that emerge in vignettes seen from four different perspectives.

- Director: Guillermo del Toro
- Stacker score: 97.83
- Metascore: 98
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 118 minutes

Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's resplendent and bizarre fairy tale for adults brims with surreal intrigue and nightmare scenarios involving a child-eating creature known as Pale Man with eyes in his palms. Taking place in Spain during World War II, "Pan's Labyrinth" mixes realistic history with a fantastical descent into the underworld to depict the horrors of wartime.

- Director: Ingmar Bergman
- Stacker score: 98.37
- Metascore: 100
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 188 minutes

Known for arthouse classics "Persona" and "Wild Strawberries," Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman may be most acclaimed for this sprawling family drama with supernatural elements set in the early 1900s. Two children (the plot is semi-autobiographical) must contend with the brutal bishop their mother marries after the death of their beloved father. Bergman's characteristic themes of psychological mayhem play out through the children's dreams and desperation for escape.

- Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
- Stacker score: 98.37
- Metascore: 100
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 99 minutes

Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colors Trilogy" took the French flag as inspiration and thematically tethered to its mottos three artsy, interlinked dramas that were co-produced by France, Poland, and Switzerland. The final "Red," after "Blue" and "White," stars Irène Jacob as a student and model whose life intersects with a retired judge. Critics hailed "Red" as the best of the three (it has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) due to its atmospheric beauty and interconnected themes.

- Director: Fritz Lang
- Stacker score: 98.37
- Metascore: 98
- IMDb user rating: 8.3
- Runtime: 153 minutes

Fritz Lang's iconic science fiction classic is a masterwork of German expressionism and silent cinema. In "Metropolis," elites frolic on garden rooftops while workers toil in the depths below, subdued by monstrous machinery. The iconic, art deco-inspired robot Maria suggests a fear of technology in this highly influential film known for its vast scale and striking visuals.

- Director: Bong Joon Ho
- Stacker score: 98.37
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 8.5
- Runtime: 132 minutes

The affluent home in "Parasite" becomes a setting for nightmarish conflicts between a rich household and the poor family they hire as servants. Bong Joon Ho entwines domestic class struggles with a dark, surrealist edge. "Parasite" became the first foreign language film to win the Best Picture Oscar, while also winning Best Foreign Language Film—the first time South Korea had been nominated in either category.

- Director: Yasujirô Ozu
- Stacker score: 98.91
- Metascore: 100
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 136 minutes

This film—#4 on Sight and Sound's 2022 Greatest Films of All Time poll—follows an elderly Japanese couple on their journey from their rural seaside home to visit their two adult children in Tokyo: their doctor son and hairdresser daughter. Though the children prove too busy to spend time with their parents, the widowed wife of their deceased second son takes it upon herself to keep them company.

- Director: Hayao Miyazaki
- Stacker score: 98.91
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 8.6
- Runtime: 125 minutes

This coming-of-age adventure is a wondrous masterpiece of Japanese animation from acclaimed writer-director Hayao Miyazaki. In this brilliantly original fairy tale, a 10-year-old girl, Chihiro, loses her parents and finds herself adrift in a world filled with strange gods and creatures. Vivid worldbuilding and glorious visuals make this a family film that transcends the usual fare with heartfelt depth and mesmerizing intensity.

- Director: Akira Kurosawa
- Stacker score: 100
- Metascore: 98
- IMDb user rating: 8.6
- Runtime: 207 minutes

Akira Kurosawa's battle-heavy masterpiece remains one of the most influential films ever. In 16th-century Japan, a ragtag group of seven fighters band together at a village outpost as plunderers surround from all sides. The tense and prolonged final battle, as well as the "team of heroes against impossible odds" narrative, show up again in countless combat and action films that obsess over honor and what makes a hero.

Data reporting by Lucas Hicks. Story editing by Carren Jao. Copy editing by Robert Wickwire.