25 international movies every film lover needs to see at least once

- 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: 8.0
- 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 Bosnian Serb 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 Serb 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 firebombing of Kobe in the final months of World War II. 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: 8.3
- 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: 7.9
- 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. Lancaster performed his lines in English, and for the film's Italian release, he was later dubbed by an Italian voice actor. U.S. audiences first saw a shortened, English-dubbed cut, with awkward results.

- Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
- Stacker score: 97.83
- Metascore: 98
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- 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 Norwegian mental hospital, that Dreyer's original version of the film was found in near-pristine condition after more than 50 years.

- Director: Akira Kurosawa
- Stacker score: 97.83
- Metascore: 98
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- 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 the 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: 8.0
- 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: 8.2
- 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 International Feature Film. It was the first time South Korea had been nominated in either category.

- Director: Yasujirô Ozu
- Stacker score: 98.91
- Metascore: 100
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 136 minutes

This film (No. 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 them 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.

More From Stacker

• 25 best films of all time: A cross-genre look at the movies that have stood the test of time, from silent classics to modern masterpieces.
• 100 best American movies of all time: The Hollywood side of the story, from early epics to modern classics.
• Best animated films of all time: Hand-drawn masterpieces, stop-motion marvels, and the computer-animated hits that redefined the form.

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