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La Strada (1954)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
The very first winner of the competitive category, and still one of its most moving. Giulietta Masina's Gelsomina, a dreamy young woman sold to the brutish strongman Zampanò, is a clown-faced performance that communicates almost entirely through her eyes and posture, which is exactly why it travels across languages so easily. Anthony Quinn growls his way through the other half of the double act.
Fellini was still close to neorealism here, so the roadside Italy of tents, mud and village festivals feels lived in rather than staged. Nino Rota's trumpet theme will follow you home.
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Nights of Cabiria (1957)
8.1/10on IMDb
Released
Fellini won back to back, and the second win is arguably the better film. Masina returns as Cabiria, a kind-hearted prostitute in Rome who keeps getting robbed, dumped and humiliated and keeps choosing hope anyway. She won Best Actress at Cannes for it, and her final close-up is one of the great endings in cinema.
Pier Paolo Pasolini helped with the street dialogue, which gives the Roman outskirts a scrappy authenticity. If the story feels familiar, that is because Broadway turned it into Sweet Charity.
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Mon Oncle (1958)
7.6/10on IMDb
Released
The ideal pick for a mixed-language audience, because there is barely any dialogue to translate. What speech there is works almost like a sound effect, and the comedy lives in sight gags: Monsieur Hulot, the bumbling uncle, versus his sister's gadget-crammed Villa Arpel, a modernist house designed for style rather than use.
It was Jacques Tati's first film in color, and the contrast between Hulot's crumbling old quarter and the sterile suburb is a gentle but pointed take on postwar France racing toward modernity. Children laugh at the fountain; adults laugh at themselves.
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The Virgin Spring (1960)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
Bergman at his most elemental: a medieval Swedish tale, adapted from a 13th-century ballad, about a father's revenge after his daughter is raped and murdered on her way to church. Max von Sydow's Töre, wrestling a young tree to the ground with his bare hands before he acts, is an unforgettable image of faith breaking down.
Be warned that the assault scene is hard to watch and drew censorship in the United States at the time. The story was later reworked as the exploitation horror The Last House on the Left, which only shows how much restraint and moral weight Bergman brought to the same material.
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8½ (1963)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
The film about making films that every later one borrows from. Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a famous director stuck with writer's block on a science fiction epic, while his producer, wife, mistress and memories crowd in on him at a spa resort. Fantasy and reality slide into each other without warning.
By Fellini's own count it was his eight-and-a-halfth film, hence the title. It also won the Oscar for black-and-white costume design, and it sits in the top tier of the Sight and Sound critics' and directors' polls. Not the easiest entry here, but the most influential.
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Closely Watched Trains (1966)
7.6/10on IMDb
Released
Proof that a war film can be funny, sexy and devastating all at once. Jiří Menzel adapts Bohumil Hrabal's novella about Miloš, a shy apprentice train dispatcher at a sleepy station in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, more worried about his love life than the resistance going on around him.
It is one of the best-known films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, and its deadpan humor about small-town officials and bureaucratic absurdity says as much about life under occupation as any battle scene. The ending lands like a slap.
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Z (1969)
8.1/10on IMDb
Released
A political thriller that moves like a heist movie and still makes your blood boil. Costa-Gavras fictionalizes the 1963 murder of the Greek politician and physician Grigoris Lambrakis, with Jean-Louis Trintignant as the quietly relentless magistrate who refuses to accept the official story of an accident.
Shot as a French and Algerian co-production while Greece was under the junta it attacks, it was entered for Algeria, won the editing Oscar as well, and was only the second foreign-language film nominated for Best Picture. The rapid-fire cutting still feels modern, and the closing epilogue hits hard.
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The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
7.7/10on IMDb
Released
Luis Buñuel's best joke, stretched to feature length and never wearing thin. A group of wealthy friends, led by Fernando Rey's smooth diplomat, keep sitting down to dinner and keep getting interrupted, by soldiers, a dead innkeeper's vigil and, increasingly, by their own dreams, one of which leaves them seated on a stage in front of a jeering audience.
The film never explains itself, and the characters accept every absurdity with perfect manners, which is precisely the satire. Buñuel once joked that whenever he needed another scene he simply filmed one of his dreams. It is the funniest film on this list and a fine introduction to surrealism for anyone wary of the word.
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Day for Night (1973)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
A love letter to the chaos of making a movie, with François Truffaut himself playing Ferrand, the director trying to finish a melodrama while his cast falls apart. Jacqueline Bisset plays a fragile British star and Jean-Pierre Léaud a lovesick young actor, and the backstage romances are more gripping than the film they are shooting.
The title is the French name for the old trick of shooting night scenes in daylight, and the film is full of that kind of affectionate trade secret. If 8½ is the director's nightmare, this is the crew's warm, gossipy daydream. It is a gentler, more accessible place to start.
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Amarcord (1973)
7.8/10on IMDb
Released
Fellini's fourth win in the category and his warmest film. The title means "I remember" in the dialect of Romagna, and it plays like a year of half-true memories from a seaside village near Rimini in the 1930s, seen through the teenage Titta, his shouting family and a gallery of local eccentrics.
What makes it more than nostalgia is how it shows ordinary people drifting into fascism with a shrug and a parade. Episodic rather than plot-driven, so it suits a relaxed evening; the snowfall, the passing ocean liner and Nino Rota's score are the moments people carry away.
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Dersu Uzala (1975)
8.2/10on IMDb
Released
Akira Kurosawa, working for the Soviet studio Mosfilm, in Russian, in the forests of the Russian Far East. It is based on the explorer Vladimir Arsenyev's memoir of his surveying trips and his friendship with Dersu, an aging hunter played with total conviction by Maxim Munzuk.
The pleasure is in watching a man who reads the forest like a book teach a soldier how to survive it; the blizzard on Lake Khanka, when Dersu must build a shelter fast enough to keep them both alive through the night, is pure suspense. Shot on 70 mm in harsh conditions, it rewards the biggest screen you can find and runs long, so start early.
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Fanny and Alexander (1982)
8.1/10on IMDb
Released
Bergman meant this as his last feature film and poured everything into it: a rich theatrical family in an early-1900s Swedish university town, a lavish Christmas, a sudden death and two children trapped in the austere house of a bishop stepfather. It moves from warmth to dread to something close to a ghost story.
It won four Oscars, including this one. Choose your version with care: the cinema cut runs 188 minutes, while the original television version runs 312 and is the one admirers insist on. Either way, it is the most generous and least forbidding way into Bergman.
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Babette's Feast (1987)
7.7/10on IMDb
Released
The best food film ever to win an Oscar, and the first Danish film to win this one. Adapted from a Karen Blixen story, it moves the action to a windswept coast of western Jutland, where two pious sisters take in Babette, a French refugee played by Stéphane Audran, and she eventually cooks their austere congregation one extraordinary dinner.
The slow first hour is the point: you need to feel the gray, frugal life before the feast arrives. Then course by course, suspicious old faces soften. Watch it before a dinner with friends, not on an empty stomach.
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Cinema Paradiso (1988)
8.5/10on IMDb
Released
The crowd-pleaser of the category, and yes, it is sentimental, but it earns its tears. A boy in a small Sicilian town befriends Alfredo, the cinema's projectionist, played with gruff tenderness by Philippe Noiret, and the village's shared life plays out in the stalls of the Paradiso.
The film flopped at home in its long Italian cut and found its audience after being trimmed to 124 minutes for international release; a director's cut of nearly three hours adds the grown-up hero's reunion with his first love, which recasts what Alfredo did for him. Start with the shorter version. Ennio Morricone's score, written with his son Andrea, does the rest.
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Life Is Beautiful (1997)
8.6/10on IMDb
Released
The most divisive winner in the category, and the one many viewers know best. Roberto Benigni wrote, directed and stars as Guido, a Jewish bookseller whose madcap courtship of a schoolteacher in Arezzo in 1939 gives way to a concentration camp, where he convinces his young son that it is all an elaborate game with a tank as the prize.
Audiences adored it, and Benigni became the first man to win Best Actor for a non-English-language performance, one of its three Oscars. Critics were split: some saw a brave fable about protecting a child, others felt its sentimental fantasy softened the reality of the camps. Watch it knowing that debate and decide for yourself.
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All About My Mother (1999)
7.8/10on IMDb
Released
Pedro Almodóvar's breakthrough with Oscar voters is also his most purely moving film. After her teenage son is killed by a car, Manuela, played by Cecilia Roth, travels from Madrid to Barcelona and falls in with a found family of actresses, a pregnant nun and a transgender sex worker with the best monologue of the decade.
It nods openly to All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire, and it won Almodóvar Best Director at Cannes too. The colors are loud, the melodrama is unashamed and the kindness is real, which makes it a perfect bridge for anyone who thinks art-house means austere.
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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
7.8/10on IMDb
Released
The film that convinced a generation of American multiplex audiences to read subtitles: it became the highest-grossing foreign-produced film in American box office history, at around $128 million. Ang Lee's Mandarin-language martial arts romance sends sword fighters skimming over rooftops and swaying in bamboo treetops, choreographed by Yuen Wo-ping.
Underneath the wirework is a story of restrained love between Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh and the reckless freedom of Zhang Ziyi's young noblewoman. It won four Oscars from ten nominations, including a Best Picture nomination, and it makes a terrific first subtitled film for teenagers.
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The Lives of Others (2006)
8.4/10on IMDb
Released
A surveillance thriller in which the tension comes from a man listening. In East Berlin in 1984, Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler bugs the apartment of a playwright and his actress partner, and slowly finds that the lives coming through his headphones mean more to him than the state he serves. Ulrich Mühe's tightly controlled performance does almost everything with his face.
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck wrote and directed it as his feature debut, and it remains the most gripping film about what life under the East German state felt like. The last line is one of the most satisfying payoffs in modern cinema.
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The Secret in Their Eyes (2009)
8.2/10on IMDb
Released
A murder mystery, a slow-burning love story and a portrait of Argentina sliding toward dictatorship, all in one. Ricardo Darín plays Benjamín Espósito, a retired court employee who cannot let go of a rape and murder case from the mid-1970s, the year before the military seized power.
The famous set piece is a continuous five-minute shot that swoops into a packed soccer stadium and follows a chase through the crowd. It was Argentina's second win, after The Official Story. Skip the 2015 Hollywood remake, which critics compared unfavorably to this original.
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A Separation (2011)
8.3/10on IMDb
Released
The best film of its year in any language, and the one to show anyone who thinks they know nothing about modern Iran. A middle-class couple heading for divorce, a father with Alzheimer's, a hired caregiver and a sudden fall spiral into a legal dispute where every character has a reasonable case and nobody is wholly right.
Asghar Farhadi builds it like a thriller out of everyday detail, and their young daughter, watching the adults bend the truth, is the film's conscience. It was the first Iranian film to win this Oscar and the first to take the Golden Bear in Berlin. Great for a discussion afterward.
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Amour (2012)
7.9/10on IMDb
Released
The hardest watch on the list, and among the most rewarding. Michael Haneke follows Georges and Anne, retired music teachers in a Paris apartment, after she suffers a stroke at breakfast and he becomes her caregiver. Jean-Louis Trintignant, back on screen after 14 years, and Emmanuelle Riva give performances of complete honesty about aging and devotion.
It won the Palme d'Or and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress as well as winning this award for Austria. Do not choose it for a light night out; choose it when you want a film that stays with you for weeks.
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The Great Beauty (2013)
7.7/10on IMDb
Released
The most seductive travel film on this list, even though it is really about emptiness. Toni Servillo plays Jep Gambardella, a 65-year-old journalist and fixture of Rome's party circuit, drifting from rooftop dance parties to dawn walks past palazzi, fountains and churches while wondering why he never wrote a second novel.
Paolo Sorrentino's film plays almost like a sequel to Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which makes it an ideal pairing with the Fellini winners earlier on this list. It also took the Golden Globe and the BAFTA in the same category. Plot is thin by design; let the images and the music carry you.
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Ida (2013)
7.4/10on IMDb
Released
Black-and-white images so precisely composed that each one could hang on a wall. Set in Poland in 1962, it follows a young woman about to take her vows as a Catholic nun who meets her only living relative, a hard-drinking aunt and former Communist prosecutor, and learns that her parents were Jewish.
Paweł Pawlikowski shot it in the boxy 4:3 frame to evoke Polish films of the early 1960s, often leaving his characters tiny at the bottom of the frame. It became the first Polish film to win this Oscar. Short, quiet and devastating, it is a fine pick for a weeknight.
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Son of Saul (2015)
7.4/10on IMDb
Released
A Holocaust film unlike any other, because it refuses to let you look away or see too much. László Nemes, in his feature debut, keeps the camera pressed close to Saul, a Hungarian prisoner in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, so the horrors around him stay blurred at the edges of a narrow, almost square frame while the sound tells you everything.
It won the Grand Prix at Cannes and became only the second Hungarian winner of this Oscar, after István Szabó's Mephisto. This is an endurance test rather than an evening's entertainment, but few films make history feel this immediate.
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