The 30 Best Foreign-Language Movies on Netflix

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The 30 Best Foreign-Language Movies on Netflix

Movies have the wonderful ability to shift perception and help you to see and understand the other. Nowhere is this more apparent than in foreign-language films. For a century, cinema has helped us glimpse life in countries where we may never set foot. While Hollywood still dominates the box office, art houses and services like Netflix have given us easy access to films from around the globe. We scoured Netflix’s international movie offerings for our favorites. The list includes movies from a dozen different languages from a dozen or more different countries—from traditional cinema powerhouses like France, Italy and Japan to more recent centers of creativity like South Korea, Brazil and even the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

Here are the 30 Best Foreign-Language Movies on Netflix:

1. The Last ForestYear: 2022
Director: Luiz Bolognesi
Genre: Documentary
Language: Yanomamö, Portuguese
Rating: NR

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A 76-minute documentary from director Luiz Bolognesi and co-writer/subject/Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa, The Last Forest blends gripping mythological reenactments with slice-of-life footage to craft an incisive and insightful look at an Indigenous culture resisting the corrupting—of mind and body, thanks to chemicals and COVID-19—influence of capitalistic greed. In the rainforests of Brazil, the lure of gold still brings out the worst in outsiders. Through arresting shots drenched in green and yellow, then submerged in smoke and sound, Bolognesi sets the scene while Kopenawa tells their stories. Their methods combine to make The Last Forest a rhythmic and liminal protest that’ll easily entrance you with its skillful sensations. But Bolognesi’s technical abilities at capturing motion and process shouldn’t be ignored, despite the film’s sometimes gossamer beauty: Watching a bow draw and loose an arrow, or a kid nestle into a hammocked parent, is artful and satisfying through his lens. In that blend of practicality and abstraction, it truly feels like Bolognesi and Kopenawa let you into their lives—and there’s no better way to build empathy and respect than that.—Jacob Oller


2. A Cop MovieYear: 2021
Director: Alonso Ruizpalacios
Genre: Documentary
Language: Spanish
Rating: R

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Out of the many striking shots captured in the docu-fiction hybrid A Cop Movie, one conveys the essence of director Alonso Ruizpalacios’ examination of Mexico’s police force unlike any other. After tying her wrist to a long, flimsy piece of rope, police academy trainee Teresa prepares to jump off of a 30-foot diving platform and into a swimming pool. It is the last challenge she must overcome in order to graduate—that of “decisiveness”—but poses an enormous threat to her life as she cannot swim, her likely fate of drowning callously counteracted by keeping her wrist tethered to land. Interestingly, Teresa turns out to be less of a documentary subject and more of an avatar for Ruizpalacios to survey the civilian perspective of the country’s police force. Presented as the honest central subject for nearly half of the film, Teresa (who is based on a real person) turns out to be played by actress Monica del Carmen, who has expertly molded herself in the real-life officer’s image, reenacting memories from her days as an academy student to her most recent workplace woes patrolling the streets of Mexico City. At her side is fellow actor Raúl Briones, who portrays Montoya (also a real guy), the second half of the duo dubbed “the love patrol” by other cops due to their flirtatious relationship as partners. Though initially presenting themselves as two officers simply doing their best within a crumbling system, the second half of the film makes it clear that these sentiments are only the biased projections of their real-life counterparts. Through carefully crafting this illusion and then stealthily unveiling the hypocrisy behind it, A Cop Movie is subtle yet audacious in its indictment of police corruption and the individual officers who buy into it—their good intentions be damned. —Natalia Keogan


3. The DiscipleYear: 2021
Director: Chaitanya Tamhane
Stars: Aditya Modak, Arun Dravid, Sumitra Bhave, Deepika Bhide Bhagwat, Kiran Yadnyopavit
Genre: Drama
Language: Marathi
Rating: TV-MA

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Indian filmmaker Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple follows an aspiring singer of Indian classical music. The film is one of the most astute and compassionate depictions of artistic struggle and stagnation I’ve ever seen. Featuring gorgeous performances of Hindustani traditional music—particularly from first-time actor Aditya Modak as the eponymous disciple Sharad—The Disciple investigates the validity of tradition in the face of commercial modernity, wavering somewhere between ardent purism and complacent acceptance. Executive produced by Alfonso Cuarón, The Disciple and Tamhane will certainly pique the interest of cinephiles interested in what it means to preserve seemingly archaic artforms in a world of faltering attention spans and self-discipline. —Dom Sinacola


4. Under the ShadowYear: 2016
Director: Babak Anvari
Stars: Narges Rashidi, Avin Manshadi, Bobby Naderi, Ray Haratian, Arash Marandi
Genre: Horror
Language: Persian
Rating: PG-13

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For most of the film, Babak Anvari is crafting a stifling period drama, a horror movie of a different sort that tangibly conveys the claustrophobia of Iran during its tumultuous post-revolution period. Anvari, himself of a family that eventually fled the Ayatollah’s rule, has made Under the Shadow as statement of rebellion and tribute to his own mother. It’s a distinctly feminist film: Shideh (Narges Rashidi) is cast as the tough heroine fighting back against greater hostile forces—a horror movie archetype that takes on even more potency in this setting. Seeing Shideh defy the Khomeini regime by watching a Jane Fonda workout video, banned by the state, is almost as stirring as seeing her overcome her personal demons by protecting her child from a more literal one. —Brogan Morris

 


5. I Lost My BodyYear: 2019
Director: Jérémy Clapin
Stars: Hakim Faris Hamza, Victoire Du Bois, Patrick d’Assumçao
Genre: Animation, Science Fiction
Language: French
Rating: NR

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While we’re on board, at least passively, for however many sequels Pixar wants to give Toy Story, patient for however long another one takes, I Lost My Body is a singular animated film, increasingly of the kind that, frankly, don’t get made anymore. Partly because hand-drawn features made by small studios are rarer than ever, but mostly because it’s a defiantly adult animated film, wreathed in oblique storytelling and steeped in grief. Ostensibly about an anthropomorphic hand climbing and skittering its way across the city to find the person to whom it was once attached—the story of its severing slowly coming to light—the beauty of director Jérémy Clapin’s images, often limned in filth and decay, is in how revelatory they can be when tied so irrevocably to the perspective of a small hand navigating both its nascent life in the treacherous urban underground and the traumatic memories of its host body’s past. I Lost My Body is an unassuming, quietly heartbreaking achievement, one the Academy needs to prioritize now more than ever over expectedly competent big studio fare. —Dom Sinacola


6. Blame!Year: 2017
Director: Hiroyuki Seshita
Stars: Sora Amamiya, Kana Hanazawa, Takahiro Sakurai
Genre: Anime
Language: Japanese
Rating: TV-14

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When it comes to dark industrial sci-fi, Tsutomu Nihei is a visionary. Trained as an architect before pursuing a career as a manga author, Nihei’s art is simultaneously sparse and labyrinthine, his body of work defined by a unifying obsession with invented spaces. Byzantine factories with gothic accents spanning across impossible chasms, populated by bow-legged synthoids and ghoulish predators touting serrated bone-swords and pulsating gristle-guns. His first and most famous series, Blame!, is considered the key text in Nihei’s aesthetic legacy, going so far as to inspire everything from videogames, to music, and even art and fashion. Past attempts have been made to adapt the series into an anime, though none have been able to materialize successfully. That is, until now. With the support of Netflix, Hiroyuki Seshita of Polygon Pictures has delivered that long-awaited Blame! film. Set on a far-future Earth consumed by a massive, self-replicating superstructure known as ‘The City’, Blame! follows Killy, a taciturn loner, wandering the layers of the planet in search of a human possessing the ‘net terminal gene,’ an elusive trait thought to be the only means of halting the city’s perpetual hostile expansion. Boasting a screenplay penned by Sadayuki Murai, famed for his writing on such series as Cowboy Bebop and Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue, and supervised by Nihei himself, Seshita’s film abbreviates much of the manga’s early chapters and streamlines the story into an altogether more narrative and action-driven affair. Art director Hiroshi Takiguchi deftly replicates Nihei’s distinctive aesthetic, achieving in color what was before only monochromatic, while Yuki Moriyama capably improves on the uniform character designs of the original, imparting its casts with distinct, easily identifiable traits and silhouettes that greatly improve the story’s parsability. Blame! is as faithful an adaptation as is possible and as fitting an introduction to the series as the manga itself. Blame! builds a strong case for being not only one of the most conceptually entertaining anime films of late, but also for being one of, if not the best original anime film to grace Netflix in a long time. —Toussaint Egan


7. AthenaYear: 2022
Director: Romain Gavras
Stars: Dali Benssalah, Sami Slimane, Anthony Bajon, Ouassini Embarek, Alexis Manenti
Genre: Drama, thriller
Language: French
Rating: R

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It’s been more than a decade since Romain Gavras filled his raw music video for “No Church in the Wild” with Molotovs, stolen police horses and dropkicked riot shields—visual motifs of protest heroics—and the only thing that’s changed is our familiarity with the aftermath. The rage behind these images still burns, but we know the cold comfort left behind when the embers are finally stomped out. Yet, the only thing to do is light the blaze again, which Gavras does in the riveting, vital Athena. A war epic between the people and the state, it sprints through a grassroots resistance movement like a brushfire: Blinding, dangerous, all-consuming. The warzone is Athena, a French housing project, where tragedy has assembled a community, grown from a family. Idir, 13 and the youngest of four brothers—Karim (Sami Slimane), Abdel (Dali Benssalah) and Moktar (Ouassini Embarek)—has been beaten to death by police. Someone recorded it on their phone. But we find this out in sprinkled bits of exposition, blown to confetti and wafting through the smoke-filled air. Our immediate attention is on Karim, leading a tracksuited pack of neighbors and like-minded young people, raiding a police station. The opening scene, the first of many incredible feats of planning, camerawork and drone operation, will make you vibrate through your seat. Gavras shoots long tracking shots like caffeine straight into your eyes: Painfully energizing. Athena’s opening is one of the year’s best, a piece of relentless, fist-pumping, jaw-clenching, goosebumping action that doesn’t stop until you’re fully radicalized. It’s then that you start peering through the style, seeing how it mirrors the personalities of its perspective characters. There’s a reason Athena feels like a heart attack in motion. There’s pain and panic. Your heart rate isn’t spiking just from the rush. But until we realize that, Karim and his crew star in a sweeping, large-scale epic—a modern 1917 where the horrifying euphoria of war has come home. Athena isn’t here for subtlety. It’s here to blow the drums out of your ears, the lids off your eyes, the lead from your shoes. With shots that start at “un-fucking-believable” and rocket towards “im-fucking-possible,” its grandiose vision aims to define an international symbol of modernity: Protest As War. Benssalah and Slimane, more political gradients than people, guide us along the mythmaking until we’ve fully grasped the absurdity of Athena being both the God of wisdom and war. But, as Frank Ocean sings in “No Church in the Wild,” what’s a God to a nonbeliever? Athena burns bright and fast, searing its unforgettable battle cry into the screen over just 99 minutes. Its idealistic action will stay with you for far longer.—Jacob Oller


8. RRRYear: 2022
Director: S. S. Rajamouli
Stars: N. T. Rama Rao Jr., Ram Charan, Ajay Devgn, Alia Bhatt, Shriya Saran, Samuthirakani, Ray Stevenson, Alison Doody, Olivia Morris
Genre: Historical drama
Language: Hindi
Rating: NR

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A Telugu epic rivalling even the over-the-top antics of writer/director S. S. Rajamouli’s previous massive blockbusters (the two Baahubali films), RRR’s endearingly repetitive and simple title reflects a three-hour romp through Indian colonial history filled with the primal pleasures of brotherhood and balls. Almost cartoonishly political, its story of star-crossed besties Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan) and Komaram Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) is one focused on shallow contrasts masking bone-deep similarities. Based on two superheroicized revolutionaries—ones that never, but should have, saved a child by simultaneously bungeeing a tethered motorcycle and horse over opposite sides of a bridge—the at-odds heroes represent the rural and urban poles opposing the British colonizers. Caricatures of the urbane heartthrob and the noble backwoods beast, the two embodiments of cultural pride battle CG beasts, ridiculous Brits and each other—though you can’t help but hope they end up holding each other tight. (They do squats while riding each other piggyback. C’mon.) Their back-and-forth, glisteningly homoerotic friendship walks a taut narrative tightrope, but with the movie’s maximalist filmmaking as its balancing rod. A phenomenally thrumming and amusingly worded soundtrack accompanies some of the year’s most bombastic action sequences and charming dance scenes without mussing a single mustache hair. The two beefy and hyper-masculine leads span silent comedy, musical song-and-dance prowess and elegant fight choreography as the kind of do-it-all stars we just don’t get in the U.S. anymore. As their morally turbulent path rages against the pure evil of the cruel white oppressors, any doubt that RRR is a modern myth fades deep into the shadows of the jungle. Overflowing with symbols, political shorthand and stereotypes of all kinds, RRR rises, roars and revolts with raw cinematic power—and enough fascinating density to warrant watching and discussing over and over again.—Jacob Oller


9. Roma>Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Stars: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Diego Cortina Autrey, Carlos Peralta
Genre: Drama
Language: Spanish, Mixtec
Rating: R

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Alfonso Cuarón’s most intimate film is also his most distancing. The camera sits back, black-and-white, focused not on the bourgeois children that represent the cinematographer-writer-director and his siblings growing up in Mexico City several decades ago, but moreso on the indigenous woman (Yalitza Aparicio) that cares for them and the household. Not even entirely focused on her, perhaps more focused on its classicist compositions of a place that no longer exists in the way Cuarón remembers it. The camera gazes and moves in trans-plane sequencing, giving us foreground, mid-ground and background elements in stark digital clarity. The sound mix is Dolby Atmos and enveloping. But the base aesthetic and narrative is Fellini, or long-lost Mexican neorealism, or Tati’s Playtime but with sight gags replaced by social concern and personal reverie. Reserved and immersive, introspective and outward-looking, old and new—some have accused Roma of being too calculated in what it tries to do, the balancing act it tries to pull off. Perhaps they’re not wrong, but it is to Cuarón’s immense credit as a thoughtful technician and storyteller that he does, in fact, pull it off. The result is a singular film experience, one that recreates something that was lost and then navigates it in such a way as to find the emergent story, then from that to find the emotional impact. So that when we come to that point late in Roma, we don’t even realize the slow, organic process by which we’ve been invested fully into the film; we’re not ready to be hit as hard as we are when the wallops come and the waves crash. It’s almost unbearable, but we bear it because we care about these people we’ve become involved with. And such is life. —Chad Betz


10. The Hand of GodYear: 2021
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Stars: Filippo Scotti, Toni Servillo, Teresa Saponangelo, Marlon Joubert, Luisa Ranieri, Renato Carpentieri, Massimiliano Gallo, Betti Pedrazzi, Biagio Manna, Ciro Capano
Genre: Drama
Language: Italian
Rating: R

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Paolo Sorrentino bookends his new coming-of-age opus, The Hand of God, with divine representation, and spends every moment in between grousing over life’s endless parade of disappointment. Humanity is dreadful. Everything is a failure. Reality is lousy. “What a shitty world this is,” one woman opines around 45 minutes into the movie. “You go buy dessert and when you get back, your husband’s in jail.” The details are irrelevant. It’s the sentiment that lands. The dialogue reads like Sorrentino soliloquizing via his characters, airing grievance after grievance about the grounding effect of The Hand of God’s story on its plot: Set in 1980s Naples, attending to the rich, boring routine comprising the comings and going of the tight-knit family Schisa—father Saverio (Toni Servillo) and mother Maria (Teresa Saponangelo), and their sons, eldest Marchino (Marlon Joubert) and youngest Fabietto (Filippo Scotti)—Sorrentino constructs the film with fewer surrealist flourishes than in his latter-day works, a la 2018’s Loro, 2015’s Youth and 2013’s The Great Beauty, where a man makes a giraffe disappear into thin air in the middle of a Roman colosseum. Placed next to these pictures, The Hand of God is downright normal. Normalcy may not satisfy Sorrentino’s characters, whether principle or supporting, but The Hand of God finds abundance in quotidian Italian conventions: Abundance of meaning, abundance of beauty, abundance of comedy, and so as to avoid burying the lede, The Hand of God is consistently hilarious for the first hour or so (an opening scene of domestic violence notwithstanding). The Hand of God isn’t escapism, contradicting Fabietto’s late-stage career goals. It is an entertaining hoot and a poignant drama that mellows into an exercise in bereavement in its second half, where Fabietto takes his mind off of a world-shattering tragedy by fanboying out over Capuano and getting into trouble with Armando (Biagio Manna), Sorrentino’s secret weapon: A gregarious cigarette smuggler whose wild streak belies abiding loyalty to whomever he calls “friend.” It’s impossible to keep up. The Hand of God doesn’t try to. Instead, guided by Fabietto, the movie takes its time. It watches. It breathes. It captures life with a clarity even Sorrentino’s best efforts haven’t quite—which makes it his best effort to date.—Andy Crump


11. OkjaYear: 2017
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Stars: Tilda Swinton, Paul Dano, An Seo Hyun, Byun Heebong, Steven Yeun, Lily Collins, Yoon Je Moon, Shirley Henderson, Daniel Henshall, Devon Bostick, Woo Shik Choi, Giancarlo Esposito, Jake Gyllenhaal
Genre: Action, Adventure, Drama
Language: Korean, English
Rating: NR

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Okja takes more creative risks in its first five minutes than most films take over their entire span, and it doesn’t let up from there. What appears to be a sticking point for some critics and audiences, particularly Western ones, is the seemingly erratic tone, from sentiment to suspense to giddy action to whimsy to horror to whatever it is Jake Gyllenhaal is doing. But this is part and parcel with what makes Bong Joon-ho movies, well, Bong Joon-ho movies: They’re nuanced and complex, but they aren’t exactly subtle or restrained. They have attention to detail, but they are not delicate in their handling. They have multiple intentions, and they bring those intentions together to jam. They are imaginative works that craft momentum through part-counterpart alternations, and Okja is perhaps the finest example yet of the wild pendulum swing of a Bong film’s rhythmic tonality. Okja is also not a film about veganism, but it is a film that asks how we can find integrity and, above all, how we can act humanely towards other creatures, humans included. The answers Okja reaches are simple and vital, and without really speaking them it helps you hear those answers for yourself because it has asked all the right questions, and it has asked them in a way that is intensely engaging. —Chad Betz


12. AtlanticsYear: 2019
Director: Mati Diop
Stars: Mame Bineta Sane, Amadou Mbow, Nicole Sougou, Aminate Kane
Genre: Drama, Romance
Language: Wolof, French
Rating: NR

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Atlantics is quite the announcement for writer-drector Mati Diop. She takes the magic realism of a peer like Alice Rohrwacher and carries it to the world’s margins, examining class struggle in a Senegalese city by the Atlantic. Through the gritty, blustery opening images shot as artful document of the Dakar shore (outstanding work by cinematographer Claire Mathon) and the hypnotic electronic score by Fatima Al Qadiri, Diop is able to evoke an incomparable mood and sense of place. That it might look and sound so alien to an American watching this film on Netflix is perhaps a sharp enough indictment of the ways in which we intellectually seclude ourselves from realities beyond our own. Atlantics is about that and it’s about the breaking of that. It’s about the mystery of identity and how one can find identity by taking on the identity of something other, or can find it when looking in a mirror—not for the physical self but for the spirit. Congruously, it’s also about losing the identities that are culturally prescribed, that we may have been born with, nurtured and/or limited by. Love, the film posits, is a catalyst; love helps reform identities in transgressive and transcendent ways. And the film is at its best when it avoids being programmatic, lets its visuals pulse before you. It is yet another sad ghost story amongst many, but where it differs is finely drawing the distinction that sometimes the things that haunt the living most are not the things that were but the things that should have been. The film’s protagonist embraces that haunting as a form of hope; she loses something important and fills the hole by expanding her own self with the self that was touched by others. Though Atlantics feels elliptical in many ways, Diop has the bravery to end her film with a pretty resounding period. It’s a statement, both for itself and for its creator, and it’s a convincing one. —Chad Betz


13. Happy as LazzaroYear: 2018
Director: Alice Rohrwacher
Stars: Adriano Tardiolo, Alba Rohrwacher, Luca Chikovani
Genre: Drama
Language: Italian
Rating: PG-13

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It’s very difficult to get into too many details about Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro without spoiling it—which seems a ridiculous thing to say about a film that starts off as a rural Italian take on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, but you’ve got no idea until you’re watching it. Rohrwacher’s The Wonders was a more intimate, personal film that had moments of magic realism peeking through, just barely. Happy as Lazzaro similarly keeps the magic in check (though a scene with whispers in a field will start to invoke Fellini) until it no longer can—and then the magic explodes, blowing up the narrative and sending what’s left in an insanely bold direction. We can only be applaud its daring. If Dostoevsky was re-framing the Christ narrative, Happy as Lazzaro re-frames the very idea of a Christ narrative until it is something else entirely. Here, Christ is a mythic wolf and our kind idiot Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo) is a touched Lazarus; the difference between them is a matter of substance, time and place. Lazzaro’s goodness, like all earthly goodness, is simultaneously transcendent and doomed, but the wolf continues on beyond any mortal coil, against the flow of humanity. Lazzaro tries to follow, perhaps foolishly, perhaps blindly…but happily, nonetheless. —Chad Betz


14. Taare Zameen ParYear: 2007
Director: Aamir Khan
Stars: Darsheel Safary, Aamir Khan, Tisca Chopra
Genre: Drama
Language: Hindi
Rating: PG

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A reliable tearjerker, Taare Zameen Par shows us the power of love and acceptance through the relationship of an eight-year-old child with dyslexia and his compassionate teacher, the only adult who is able to pin down his disability. Traditional Indian educational systems are notoriously unsympathetic to mental and learning disabilities; that this film tackled the subject caused a groundswell of positive conversation during its release in 2007. It’s one of the most beautiful films of this century, and is unconventional as far as Bollywood goes—there’s noted realism to the story and virtually no song-and-dance numbers—but taps into the heart of cinema: love conquers all, and love can save us, too. —Radhika Menon


15. The Raid: Redemption
Year: 2011
Director: Gareth Evans
Stars: Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, Donny Alamsyah, Yayan Ruhian
Genre: Action
Language: Indonesian
Rating: R

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When future generations look back upon the beginning of the 21st century and seek a way to understand the claustrophobia and fear that defined so much of our popular media of the time, let them look upon The Raid and weep. Essentially one extended action set-piece, paced with super-human precision to both incite and then maximally exploit one’s heightened dopamine levels, The Raid leaves no headspace for hesitation—once you’re in, you’re at its mercy, and the film’s only relief awaits at the top of an apartment block ruled by one of Jakarta’s scrappiest, psychopathic-iest crime bosses. The Raid is what martial arts cinema looks like in our young century: bleak, dystopian and hyper-violent. This is brutality at its barest. —Dom Sinacola


16. The Raid 2: BerendalYear: 2014
Director: Gareth Evans
Stars: Iko Uwais, Arifin Putra, Oka Antara, Tio Pakusadewo, Alex Abbad, Julie Estelle
Genre: Action
Language: Indonesian
Rating: R

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Nearly five years in gestation, The Raid 2 feels like the exact kind of movie that Gareth Evans has always dreamed of making. Or…scratch that: this is the kind of movie that every fan of martial arts cinema has always dreamed of watching—the pure and unhindered manifestation of brutal hand-to-hand action shot with unrepentantly magnanimous scope. Where the original film exposed the world to a rapid-fire form of Indonesian martial arts called Pencak silat, The Raid 2 made that style of fighting the only key to survival in a society on the verge of total nihilism. Expanding from an occupied office building to the whole of the criminal underworld, The Raid 2 takes the surviving characters from the first film and pushes them toward a tragic and/or exhausted end. Practically every scene is the result of filmmaking bravura, but perhaps the most trenchant is one in which hero Rama (Iko Uwais), barely holding himself together after hours of fighting, walks slowly back through the now-quiet graveyard of defeated bodies he left in his wake not long before. It’s a humbling moment, that the calm after the storm is just a sad reflection on all the pain inflicted during the storm itself. Self-aware and yet unstoppable despite that, The Raid 2 is a new standard for action cinema. —Dominic Sinacola

 


17. LagaanYear: 2001
Director: Ashutosh Gowariker
Stars: Aamir Khan, Gracy Singh, Rachel Shelley, Paul Blackthorne, Kulbhushan Kharbanda
Genre: Bollywood, Comedy
Language: Hindi
Rating: PG

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For newcomers, Lagaan may be one of the most easy entryways into Bollywood. (The film famously received India’s third-ever Academy Award nomination in 2001.) Rooted in a rich entanglement of high-stakes sports gaming and forbidden romance, Lagaan is an epic drama based in colonial India, the story of a group of Indian villagers who challenge their British colonizers to a game of cricket in exchange for the removal of their increasingly burdensome taxes. We get recruiting and training montages, conflict amongst teammates, an intercultural flirtation and a bangin’ soundtrack from the legend A.R. Rahman. Lagaan has been rightfully hailed as one of India’s most entertaining and thoughtful productions, and it seems to only get better with age. —Radhika Menon

 


18. The Night Comes for UsYear: 2018
Director: Timo Tjahjanto
Stars: Joe Taslim, Iko Uwais, Julie Estelle, Sonny Pang
Genre: Martial Arts, Thriller
Language: Indonesian, English, Mandarin, Cantonese, French
Rating: NR

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While Gareth Evans confounded fans of The Raid movies by giving them a British folk horror film (but a darn good one) this year, Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes for Us scratches that Indonesian ultra-violent action itch. Furiously. Then stabs a shard of cow femur through it. Come for the violence, The Night Comes for Us bids you—and, also, stay for the violence. Finally, leave because of the violence. If that sounds grueling, don’t worry, it is. You could say it’s part of the point, but that might be projecting good intentions on a film that seems to care little for what’s paving the highway to hell. It’s got pedal to metal and headed right down the gullet of the abyss. It’s also got the best choreographed and constructed combat sequences of the year, and plenty of them, and they actually get better as the film goes along. There’s a scene where Joe Taslim’s anti-hero protagonist takes on a team inside a van, the film using the confines to compress the bone-crushing, like an action compactor. Other scenes are expansive in their controlled chaos and cartoonish blood-letting, like Streets of Rage levels, come to all-too-vivid life: the butcher shop level, the car garage level and a really cool later level where you play as a dope alternate character and take on a deadly sub-boss duo who have specialized weapons and styles and—no, seriously, this movie is a videogame. You’ll forget you weren’t playing it, so intensely will you feel a part of its brutality and so tapped out you’ll feel once you beat the final boss, who happens to be The Raid-star Iko Uwais with a box-cutter. It’s exceptionally painful and it goes on forever. Despite a storyline that’s basically just an excuse for emotional involvement (Taslim’s character is trying to protect a cute little girl from the Triad and has a lost-brotherhood bit with Uwais’s character) and, more than that, an easy way to set up action scenes on top of action scenes, there’s something about the conclusion of The Night Comes For Us that still strikes some sort of nerve of pathos, despite being mostly unearned in any traditional dramatic sense. Take it as a testament to the raw power of the visceral: A certain breed of cinematic action—as if by laws of physics—demands a reaction. —Chad Betz

 


19. QueenYear: 2013
Director: Vikas Bahl
Stars: Kangana Ranaut, Rajkummar Rao, Lisa Haydon
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Language: Hindi
Rating: TV-MA

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Sometimes, the worst day of your life can turn into the greatest opportunity. Rani (Kangana Ranaut) is blindsided when her fiance ditches her the day before their wedding, citing her conservatism as an incompatibility in their relationship. Shocked, Rani decides to set out on their European honeymoon by herself. While galavanting in Paris and Amsterdam, Rani meets people from all walks of life, and learns who she is and what she wants. Queen is a powerful piece of feminist art that stands for women’s independence and self-sufficiency, and proves that a little push into the unknown can wind up being the greatest boon. —Radhika Menon


20. The SquareYear: 2013
Director: Jehane Noujaim
Genre: Documentary
Language: Egyptian Arabic
Rating: NR

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Bringing calm insight to an impassioned, still-developing historic event, The Square looks at the 2011 Egyptian Revolution from the perspective of those who were on the frontlines from the very beginning, personalizing the dramatic developments without losing a sense of greater stakes. Director Jehane Noujaim, who previously helmed Control Room and co-directed Startup.com, has delivered a snapshot of a grassroots political movement over its bumpy two-year history, embracing the emotional complexity and logistical obstacles that have made Egyptians’ road to democracy so difficult. Using no voiceover narration and only a handful of intertitles that inform the viewer about the exact time period of events, The Square seeks to create an urgent, immediate experience that tells its story through the reactions of its main participants. In the West, the scenes of peaceful, joyous protest at Tahrir Square were warmly greeted as hopeful signs of a new Middle East. The Square doesn’t throw cold water on those hopes as much as it meticulously demonstrates that systemic change does not come easily. That’s why you care so deeply about the people you see in this movie—it’s not that their quest is easy but that it’s so very hard. —Tim Grierson


21. All Quiet on the Western FrontYear: 2022
Director: Edward Berger
Stars: Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Aaron Hilmer, Moritz Klaus, Edin Hasanoviç, Daniel Brühl
Genre: War
Language: German
Rating: R

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There are now three major screen adaptations of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front. The first two were grim reflections of the wars of their time, and remain fascinating not just for their treatment of Remarque’s work, but for viewing them in the context of the time in which they were made: Lewis Milestone’s 1930 film landed in the precise middle of the two World Wars that forever reshaped Europe; Delbert Mann’s 1979 television adaptation inescapably called back to the Vietnam War. Edward Berger’s new adaptation, distributed by Netflix, is unique among these in that it’s actually a German-language and German-led production. Despite their clear dedication to paint a universalist picture of the futility and inhumanity of modern war, the previous productions were, on some level, putting an American spin on this tale. Berger (born in then-West Germany in 1970) is not. It’s therefore somewhat perplexing that this adaptation ditches a lot of the particulars of the novel, widens its perspective characters to include top German brass, elides characters and even changes the particulars of major plot points to tell what amounts to an almost completely different story—one with a wider scope. By virtue of including two other characters, it makes an attempt to go beyond the trenches and indict the inhumanity of the people whose words cause wars. It’s wild, compared to the mostly faithful adaptations of the past. It also, inescapably, feels as if it’s more of a war film than the others, with more action scenes and necessarily less of an examination of the effect of war on the individual soldier. It’s a completely different perspective that is exceptionally well-shot and directed and raises its voice about Germany’s part of culpability for the war. It’s therefore profoundly frustrating that All Quiet on the Western Front, at times, bucks against Remarque’s thesis. It is, nonetheless, the first All Quiet on the Western Front adaptation in wide release that we’ve got from an actual German perspective. As we grow more and more distant from the war to end all wars, that kind of reappraisal becomes even more important. Kenneth Lowe


22. OmarYear: 2014
Director:Hany Abu-Assad
Stars: Adam Bakri, Leem Lubany, Waleed Zuaiter
Genre: Drama
Language: Arabic, Hebrew
Rating: TV-MA

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More trenchant as a political allegory than a character drama, Omar is more interested in the ideas within this slow-burn thriller than in plot machinations. To writer-director Hany Abu-Assad, maniacal twists and cunning action set pieces would simply get in the way—better that we spend our time thinking about why the characters find themselves in this situation at all. Nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Omar stars Adam Bakri as the titular young Palestinian, who must daily scale the imposingly tall security wall that separates him from his girlfriend, Nadia (Leem Lubany). Though very much in love, they haven’t yet revealed their relationship to her brother (and Omar’s good friend) Tarek (Eyad Hourani), who is planning with Omar and another close pal, Amjad (Samer Bisharat), to kill an Israeli soldier. The three friends’ mission is a success—it’s Amjad who pulls the trigger—but soon after, Omar is snagged by Israeli forces, led by Agent Rami (Waleed F. Zuaiter). Threatening Omar with imprisonment, Rami promises him freedom if he’ll deliver Tarek, the group’s leader, to them in exchange. What’s most resonant in Omar is that, just as we can’t always gauge the characters, they’re, too, concealing parts of themselves from each other, a byproduct of living in a part of the world where distrust is commonplace and secrecy a necessity. Which is why Omar’s startling ending is both somewhat mystifying and also oddly perfect—we don’t see it coming, and yet deep down, we’re not surprised at all that it happened. —Tim Grierson

 


24. RavenousYear: 2017
Director: Robin Aubert
Stars: Marc-André Grondin, Monia Chokri, Brigitte Poupart, Luc Proulx, Charlotte St-Martin
Genre: Horror
Language: French
Rating: NR

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Genre geeks didn’t seem to take a lot of notice of Ravenous, beyond its Best Canadian Film award at the Toronto International Film Festival—perhaps the result of an “indie zombie drama” subgenre that seems to have run its course through films such as The Battery, and perhaps because it’s performed in French rather than English. Regardless, this is a competently crafted little drama thriller for the zombie completist, full of excellent performances from no-name actors and an intriguing take on the results of zombification. The infected here at times seem like your standard Romero ghouls, but they’re also a bit more: lost souls who have hung onto some kind of strange, rudimentary culture all their own. These aspects of the zombie plague are always hinted at, never extrapolated, but it enhances the profound feelings of loss and sadness present in Ravenous. —Jim Vorel

 


25. The Summit of the GodsYear: 2021
Director: Patrick Imbert
Stars: Lazare Herson-Macarel, Eric Herson-Macarel, Damien Boisseau, Elisabeth Ventura, Kylian Rehlinger, François Dunoyer
Genre: Anime
Language: French
Rating: PG

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Based on Jiro Taniguchi’s early ‘00s manga, which added breathtaking environmental illustrations and sharp, shadow-intensive character designs to Baku Yumemakura’s 1998 novel, The Summit of the Gods is a testament to self-motivation through the intertwined stories of two men: Mountain climber Joji Habu (Eric Herson-Macarel) and journalist Makoto Fukamachi (Damien Boisseau). Director Patrick Imbert’s French anime sees the two cross paths thanks to a legendary Vestpocket Kodak camera belonging to George Mallory, the English mountaineer who may or may not have reached the top of Everest in the ‘20s. Fukamachi sees Habu with the camera, then loses him. Fukamachi wants a scoop; Habu wants to be left alone as he prepares for his own climb. In his search for the recluse, Fukamachi compiles Habu’s life, constructing his obsessive arc event by event through unearthed news clippings. With this intercut structure, The Summit of the Gods is both a great journalism movie and great mountaineering movie—each with a series of technical steps that contain emotional weight impossible to fully explain to an outsider. Why does one seek the peak? Why does one devote themselves to finding all the details of a story? These lonely goals are personal as much as professional. The end result is clear, but the reasoning behind it all quickly becomes murky and existential under scrutiny. The clarity of the animation backs up these large questions with simple answers. The majestic, hazy colors of nature—bright blues and purples—contrast against day-to-day living in condos, barrooms and city streets that’ve lost all romance. The latter are utilitarian in their detail, so richly filled with realistic stuff as to dull you with familiarity. Then the movie takes you out on the expeditions, through the eyes of the people who live for it. The climbing sequences feature shots so stark and layered with slurries and sunbeams that their painterly abstraction will leave your jaw hanging in the snow. And yet, on a moment-to-moment level, it’s a detailed crunch of piton into stone—of clever rope knots and the muscular friction of hands and feet—undertaken by characters that move with a deliberate intent, their animations weighty enough to leave footprints and mini avalanches of pebbles. The Summit of the Gods is a subtle movie, told in shades of white and degrees of silence, but its passion burns hot beneath the icy rime. Its complex storytelling and convincingly lovely vistas make its philosophical case well: Whether you’re risking it all to get to a peak, to get to the bottom of a mystery, or to create a painstaking piece of animation, you’re lucky enough to have something you love.—Jacob Oller


26. ManhuntYear: 2017
Director: John Woo
Stars: Zhang Hanyu, Masaharu Fukuyama, Ha Ji-won, Qi Wei, Angeles Woo, Jun Kunimura, Nanami Sakamura
Genre: Thriller
Language: Japanese, Mandarin
Rating: NR

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Increasingly inactive, rumors of future film projects long ago gone to pasture, John Woo might be building his mythos by default, his latest opus (from three years ago) the work of an icon undoubtedly aware of the reputation he has, which has only grown the more he’s kept quiet. Manhunt presents less of a return to form for the action movie maestro, more a culmination of his legend-making preoccupations: brotherhood, duty, vocation, trial by slo-mo obliteration, morality cut in epic swathes of gunfire, unlimited bullets forever and ever, amen. How does one celebrate one’s visual obsessions? By going belligerent with the doves, having them form a dove tornado that serves as the backdrop between our two brawling protagonists, a dove at least once giving each combatant an advantage, if brief, over the other—doves everywhere, doves as weapons and as symbols of grandiosity and as cheap plot devices, representing all that is great and all that is parodic about the director. Two men, exemplars of their professions—super lawyer Du Qiu (Zhang Hanyu) and excellent-but-troubled detective Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama)—develop something more intimate than friendship as they unearth a vast conspiracy somehow involving corporate espionage, police corruption, secret high-tech prisons and assassins enabled by super-soldier serum: bloated plot contrivances were they not indebted to every masterpiece John Woo’s ever made. These are the facets of Woo’s gun operas that we adore, and with Manhunt he’s just taking the opportunity to curate his own greatest hits collection. —Dom Sinacola

 


27. The Edge of DemocracyYear: 2019
Director: Petra Costa
Genre: Documentary
Language: Portuguese
Rating: NR

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Though her take is sweeping, her drone shots a tad too obligatory, director Petra Costa draws as many parallels as she’s able to line up the political roots of her family tree with those of her home country. The Edge of Democracy, then, is likely most compelling for viewers unfamiliar with Briazilian politics in pretty much any capacity. Costa intuits this reality—its Oscar nomination signals some Netflixian prestige for this kind of exceptionally well made documentary—and, without being explicit, makes a clear argument that Brazil is, at least, as deserving of its doom as those of us under Trump. Whether you feel that way or not—that everything is sad and fucked—as an American it’s difficult to not see the stories of these two relatively young world powers align with almost monomythical certainty. And yet, Costa allows her sadness to permeate the film, narrating frequently about her grandfather’s construction business, which flourished during the dictatorship while her mother and father put their lives on the line as revolutionaries, in between a wealth of footage and melancholy tracking shots. The moral poetry of it all tips every once in a while into the obvious, but Costa’s handle on the breadth of what she’s covering, aided by some intimate access to key political figures and Brazilian icons like Lula and Dilma Rousseff, bears impressive responsibility for all the personal connections, and self-serious gestures, she makes. —Dom Sinacola


28. Psychokinesis Year: 2018
Director: Yeon Sang-ho
Stars: Ryu Seung-ryong, Shim Eun-kyung, Park Jung-min
Genre: Superhero, Action
Language: Korean
Rotten Tomatoes Score: NA
Rating: NR

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Following up Train to Busan, his adroit add-on to the endlessly alive zombie genre, Yeon Sang-ho offers another interpretation of the zeitgeist with Psychokinesis, building a deft, vaguely political room of South Korea’s own in the cinematic superhero universe. Ryu Seung-ryong plays everyman nobody Shin Seok-heon, a dopey security guard estranged from his family, brought back into daughter Roo-mi’s (Shim Eun-kyung) life after a gang of unionized construction workers accidentally kill her mother while attempting to evict the young fried chicken entrepreneur from their small storefront. Also: Seok-heon has burgeoning superpowers of the titular variety, contracted when he drinks from a public spring polluted with an alien substance recently released into the earth via crashed space rock. Though Yeon (who also wrote the film) typically confuses comic book sensibility with a total lack of deeply written characters struggling under actually interesting motivations and backstories, Yeon isn’t particularly driven by the same forces as the MCU or the DCEU: Psychokinesis has an unfettered heart, an unfussy melodrama, in ways films of those brands don’t, not burdened by the same economic pressure—while also declaring very clearly that the police are bad. It’s all pretty refreshing in the wake of an Infinity War. —Dom Sinacola


29. DarlingsYear: 2022
Director: Jasmeet K. Reen
Stars: Alia Bhatt, Vijay Varma, Shefali Shah, Roshan Mathew
Genre: Drama
Language: Hindi

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With this film, Alia Bhatt added her name to the growing list of women producers in Bollywood. In this new role, Bhatt says she hopes to be able bring new stories and voices to the screen, especially on streaming platforms. From the moment she read the script for Darlings, she knew this was a perfect project for Netflix. Bhatt is a part of an ensemble cast who have shone in different projects in the last few years. She plays Badrunissa, a sweet young lower middle class woman, married to Hamza (Vijay Varma), a ticket collector on Mumbai’s transit system. Hamza is a decent husband but has a propensity for violence after a drink. Badru’s mother Shamsunissa (Shefali Shah) keeps urging her daughter to leave Hamza, and sometimes enlists the help of Zulfi (Roshan Mathew) in trying to talk some sense into her. But things take an unpredictable turn after an accident. Darlings manages to deliver a dark comedy for the most part. It’s a treat to watch actors such as Varma (who was an amazing discovery in Gully Boy) and Shah (who does an admirable job as deputy commissioner of police Vartika Chaturvedi in the Delhi Crime series) squabble in their domestic situations. The scenes where Badru and Shamsu go to the police station to report a crime are also a riot because of the delivery by Vijay Maurya (also a writer on this film) as Inspector Tawde. It’s clear the cast and crew had fun making the film. However, Darlings does play it a little too safe and too cute for its own good at times.–Aparita Bhandari

 


30. Space SweepersYear: 2021
Director: Jo Sung-hee
Stars: Song Joong-ki, Kim Tae-ri, Jin Seon-kyu, Yoo Hae-jin
Genre: Science-Fiction
Language: Korean
Rating: NR

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Netflix introduced its audience to Southeast Asian big-budget sci-fi with the Chinese film The Wandering Earth, a mess of a story that was still beautiful to look at. Space Sweepers, from Korean filmmaker Jo Sung-hee, is a much more cohesive and coherent offering with just as much flash. The dystopian setting sees the head of a giant tech company creating an Eden on Mars, essentially consigning most of humanity to poverty and pollution. A ragtag team of space-junk collectors is each looking after their own self-interest when they find a mysterious young girl who entangles them in much larger worries. With compelling characters, thrilling action sequences and an engaging plot, it’s a strong entry for Korea’s first sci-fi blockbuster. —Josh Jackson

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