Nineteen of the thirty-four below share the top rating. That’s unusual and says something about how these films reach an English-speaking audience. Almost nothing crosses the language barrier by accident. What arrives has already been selected several times over, so the baseline is higher than it is in any domestic list.
The other pattern is technical. A disproportionate number of these didn’t just tell a story well, they invented something. Montage, neorealism, jump cuts, the heroic bloodshed grammar that American action films have been borrowing for thirty years.
The no-subtitles rule is the dumbest limit anybody puts on their movie watching, and it costs people Kurosawa and Bergman along with the John Woo gunfights American action directors have been copying for thirty years. A line of text at the bottom of the screen is a tiny price to pay for films that taught everybody else how to cut a scene. Nineteen perfect scores on one page looks generous on paper. I don’t think a single one of them is inflated.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year.
1. Battleship Potemkin (1925)
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"Eisenstein invented montage here and every film you have seen uses it."
Potemkin is first because almost every film on this list and off it’s using a grammar this one formalized. Eisenstein’s position was that the collision between two shots produces meaning and neither shot alone does, and he built the film to prove it.
The Odessa Steps sequence is the most analyzed five minutes in cinema and the massacre it depicts didn’t happen. Eisenstein invented it, and it’s been cited as history so often that the invention is now the popular memory of 1905.
The technique is the legacy. Cutting for emotional collision and not for spatial continuity is something no filmmaker since has worked without, and De Palma, Gilliam and a hundred others have restaged the pram on the steps.
A silent film from 1925 gets a perfect score from me without a second’s hesitation. Age stops mattering the moment the Steps sequence starts, because the cutting still hits the nerves exactly the way Eisenstein built it to. The invented massacre is a small black mark, since people keep repeating it as history, but that’s what happens when a film is this persuasive. My one small gripe is the title cards, which interrupt the rhythm the cutting works so hard to build.
De Palma, Gilliam and a hundred others have restaged the pram on the steps, usually without the montage theory that produced it.
It was commissioned for the twentieth anniversary of the revolution and Eisenstein was twenty-seven when he made it.
2. Metropolis (1927)
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"The visual template for a century of science fiction, made before anybody had seen one."
Metropolis supplied the architecture of almost every cinematic future since, and it did so with no precedent to draw on. A city divided vertically between owners above and workers below, and an artificial woman built to incite them. The production nearly bankrupted UFA. It used around thirty-seven thousand extras, took over a year, and the flooding sequences reportedly left children standing in cold water for days, which Lang later acknowledged with some discomfort.
After its premiere it was cut heavily, and a serious portion was considered lost for eighty years, until a near-complete print was found in a museum in Buenos Aires in 2008 and restored.
The production nearly bankrupted UFA, used around thirty-seven thousand extras and took over a year.
The flooding sequences reportedly left children standing in cold water for days, which Lang later acknowledged with some discomfort. Heavy cuts followed its premiere and a considerable portion was considered lost for eighty years until a near-complete print was found in Buenos Aires in 2008.
3. Bicycle Thieves (1948)
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"Non-professional actors, real streets, and a plot about a stolen bicycle."
Bicycle Thieves is the foundation document of neorealism and its power is entirely proportional. A man needs his bicycle to keep the job that feeds his family, it’s stolen, and he spends a day searching Rome with his son. The stakes are small and total at once. That’s a combination almost no film manages. A bicycle is worth nothing and is the difference between employment and destitution, so every scene matters without any escalation. Lamberto Maggiorani was a factory worker and Enzo Staiola was found watching the crew in the street. De Sica turned down American financing that was conditional on casting Cary Grant. It would have destroyed the entire premise.
Lamberto Maggiorani was a factory worker and Enzo Staiola was found watching the crew in the street. De Sica turned down American financing conditional on casting Cary Grant. It would have destroyed the premise entirely.
This is the film on the list that hurts the most. A father and his small son searching Rome for a bicycle shouldn’t hurt more than a massacre, and somehow it does. Every screenwriter who thinks stakes require a bomb under a city should watch this one, because De Sica proved otherwise with a stolen bike and a working man’s pride. De Sica’s refusal to cast Cary Grant was the smartest no in movie history.
4. Wild Strawberries (1957)
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"An old man drives to collect an honorary degree and reviews his life on the way."
Wild Strawberries is the most accessible of Bergman’s major works because the structure is a road trip and the dreams are integrated and not announced. A professor drives to Lund to receive an honor and confronts his own coldness across a single day.
Bergman cast Victor Sjöström, who had been a founding director of Swedish cinema and was seventy-eight, in what became his final role. Casting the father of the national cinema as a man auditing his own legacy isn’t subtle and is entirely effective.
The opening dream, with the handless clock and the faceless man and the coffin that contains him, is the most frequently imitated sequence in the director’s output.
Bergman cast Victor Sjöström, a founding director of Swedish cinema, at seventy-eight, in what became his final role.
Casting the father of the national cinema as a man auditing his own legacy isn’t subtle and is entirely effective.
That opening dream, with the handless clock and the coffin that contains him, is the most imitated sequence in his filmography.
5. La Dolce Vita (1960)
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"Seven nights in Rome, no plot, and it gave the language the word paparazzi."
La Dolce Vita has no causal structure at all. That was the provocation in 1960 and is the reason it still works. Seven episodes across seven nights with no arc, connected only by a journalist who’s present at each. The photographer character is named Paparazzo and the word entered English, Italian and most European languages from this film. That’s a rare case of a work naming the profession it was describing.
The Vatican condemned it, which guaranteed its success, and it won the Palme d’Or. The Trevi Fountain sequence is the most reproduced image in Italian cinema and the film containing it’s three hours of despair.
The photographer character is named Paparazzo and the word entered English, Italian and most European languages from this film.
The Vatican condemned it, which guaranteed its success, and it won the Palme d’Or. The Trevi Fountain sequence is the most reproduced image in Italian cinema and the film containing it’s three hours of despair.
6. 8½ (1963)
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"A film director cannot make his film, so the film becomes about not making it."
8½ is the foundational document of modernist cinema and the ancestor of every later film about the difficulty of making one. Fellini was blocked, had a production waiting, and made the block itself the subject.
The commitment separates it from its imitators. Fellini doesn’t resolve the confusion into a lesson or arrive at a redemptive insight. Guido never makes the film, the set is dismantled, and the ending is a circus procession that means whatever the viewer needs.
The title refers to Fellini’s own filmography, being his eighth and a half work counting collaborations as halves. That’s the most Fellini fact available about it.
8½ is the film I’d hand anybody who has ever sat frozen in front of a deadline.
What I admire most is the gall. Fellini had a crew waiting and nothing to shoot, and he put his own panic on screen without once pretending he’d cured it. Most of the blocked-artist movies that came after it lose their nerve in the last reel and hand you a tidy lesson. Fellini refused, and I respect that more than any single image in the film.
The title refers to his own filmography, being his eighth and a half work counting collaborations as halves.
Guido never makes the film, the set is dismantled, and the ending is a circus procession that means whatever the viewer needs.
7. High and Low (1963)
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"Kurosawa’s best contemporary film, and it splits cleanly into two halves."
High and Low is the most structurally confident film on this list. A shoe executive about to stake everything on a takeover learns his chauffeur’s son has been kidnapped in mistake for his own, and must decide whether to pay a ransom that will ruin him for a child not his.
The first hour is a chamber drama in a single room, shot in widescreen with the characters arranged in depth, and the decision is made at the midpoint. The second hour leaves the room entirely and becomes a police procedural through Yokohama.
The transition works because the hinge is a choice. Once Gondo decides, the room has no further function, so the film abandons it. The single spot of color in a black-and-white film, pink smoke from a chimney, is the only one Kurosawa ever used.
For its first hour it’s a chamber drama in a single room shot in widescreen with characters arranged in depth.
The single spot of color in a black-and-white film, pink smoke from a chimney, is the only one Kurosawa ever used.
Mifune plays a shoe executive instead of a warrior. That’s the most against-type casting of their partnership.
8. Persona (1966)
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"An actress stops speaking and her nurse cannot stop, and the film itself breaks."
Persona is Bergman’s most demanding work and the one that admits it’s a film. An actress stops speaking mid-performance and is sent to a seaside house with a nurse who talks enough for both, and their identities begin to merge. The celluloid appears to burn through partway, the projector is shown, and the film restarts. That gesture, declaring that this is an object being run through a machine instead of a window onto anything, predates most of the theory written about it. Bergman made it after a serious illness while unsure he’d work again, and the monologue delivered twice, once on each woman’s face, is the single boldest editing decision in his filmography.
The celluloid appears to burn through partway, the projector is shown, and the film restarts. That predates most of the theory written about it. Bergman made it after a serious illness while unsure he’d work again. The monologue delivered twice, once on each woman’s face, is the single boldest editing decision in his filmography.
9. Le Samouraï (1967)
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"The founding text of the quiet assassin, and Delon barely speaks."
Le Samouraï established a character type that’s been in continuous use for nearly sixty years. Every laconic professional in cinema, from Ghost Dog to Drive to John Wick, is downstream of Melville’s contract killer.
Its opening is the lesson. Nine minutes with almost no dialogue in which Jef smokes on a bed, steals a car, tests keys from a ring until one works, and has plates changed by a man who says nothing. The audience learns everything about him from procedure.
Melville drained the color deliberately toward grey and blue, Delon wears the same trenchcoat and hat throughout, and the film opens with an invented Bushido quotation Melville wrote himself and attributed to a book that doesn’t exist.
I could happily watch those opening nine minutes on a loop.
Delon barely speaks and I believed in him completely, because Melville lets the procedure do all the talking. The sad part is the parade of imitators that kept the trenchcoat and the silence and threw away the patience. A quiet hitman is easy to costume. It takes a director willing to risk boring people to make the quiet feel earned, and Melville took that risk.
There’s almost no dialogue in the first nine minutes, with Jef smoking, stealing a car and testing keys from a ring until one works. He drained the color toward grey and blue and kept Delon in the same coat and hat throughout.
10. The Conformist (1970)
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"Storaro’s photography is the argument, and the film is about wanting to be ordinary."
The Conformist is the most visually influential film of its decade and the influence is documented. Coppola, Scorsese and Schrader have all cited it directly, and Storaro’s camerawork is visible throughout the American cinema of the 1970s.
The subject is a man who joins the fascist secret police out of a desire to be unremarkable, and is assigned to assassinate his old professor. His politics aren’t convictions; they’re camouflage. The photography makes the argument instead of illustrating it. Marcello is repeatedly shot through bars, blinds and grilles, and the sequence in the wind-blown forest where he watches the killing from inside a car without intervening is the whole character in one shot.
Coppola, Scorsese and Schrader have all cited Storaro’s camerawork directly, and its influence runs through the American seventies.
Marcello is repeatedly shot through bars, blinds and grilles. That says what a monologue about conformity would have said badly.
The sequence where he watches the killing from inside a car without intervening is the whole character in one unbroken shot.
11. Stalker (1979)
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"Three men walk into a room that grants wishes, and almost nothing happens."
Stalker is the most demanding film on this list and the one that rewards the demand. A guide leads a writer and a scientist through a forbidden Zone toward a room that supposedly grants your deepest desire, and the entire film is walking and talking. The ending is the achievement. Nobody enters the room, because each of them realizes they don’t know what their deepest desire is and are afraid of learning. A wish-granting device that the characters decline is considerably stranger than one they fight over.
The first version was destroyed in processing and Tarkovsky reshot the entire film. Several of the crew, including Tarkovsky and his wife, later died of causes that have been attributed to the chemical plant they filmed near.
The first version was destroyed in processing and Tarkovsky reshot the entire film.
Several of the crew, including Tarkovsky and his wife, later died of causes that have been attributed to the chemical plant they filmed near.
Stalker tests my patience, and I suspect it tests everybody’s.
Long takes of three men walking through the Zone and talking aren’t anybody’s idea of a fun night, and I don’t blame anybody who bails in the first hour. Stay for the door. The refusal at the threshold moved me more than any granted wish I can think of on film, because it’s the most honest thing a movie has said about how little we know what we want. What the location may have cost the crew makes the film heavier still.
12. Fanny and Alexander (1982)
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"Bergman’s intended farewell, and it exists in a three-hour cut and a five-hour one."
Fanny and Alexander is the warmest thing Bergman made. That isn’t a sentence anybody expected to write about him, and he conceived it as the conclusion to his cinema career.
An enormous Christmas at the Ekdahl house fills the first hour, generous and chaotic and alive, and it exists so the audience knows exactly what the children lose when their widowed mother remarries a bishop and they’re moved into his stripped house. It exists as a three-hour theatrical cut and a five-hour television version, and the longer one is the film. Bergman considered the television edit definitive and the theatrical release a compromise. Bergman conceived it as the conclusion to his cinema career and it’s the warmest thing he made.
It spends the first hour on an enormous Christmas at the Ekdahl house so the audience knows exactly what the children lose afterward. It exists as a three-hour theatrical cut and a five-hour television version, and Bergman considered the longer one definitive.
13. Wings of Desire (1987)
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"Angels over a divided Berlin who can hear every thought and touch nothing."
Wings of Desire uses the simplest formal device on this list to the greatest effect. Monochrome for the angels’ perspective and color for the human one, so the audience feels the difference instead of being told about it. Bruno Ganz plays an angel who has observed humanity since before there were people and decides he’d rather have cold hands and bad coffee. The desire isn’t for meaning; it’s for sensation and for consequences.
Handke wrote the monologues and the cast improvised much of the dialogue. Peter Falk appears as himself and turns out to be a former angel. That shouldn’t work at all and is the best thing in the film.
Monochrome for the angels’ perspective and color for the human one means the audience feels the difference instead of being told.
Handke wrote the monologues and much of the dialogue was improvised on location in a Berlin that still had a wall.
Peter Falk appears as himself and is revealed to be a former angel. That shouldn’t work and is the best thing in the film.
14. Hard Boiled (1992)
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"Woo’s last Hong Kong film, and the hospital sequence rewrote action cinema."
Hard Boiled is the most influential action film of the last forty years and American cinema has been borrowing from it continuously without the sincerity that made it work. The hospital siege runs roughly forty minutes and includes a continuous take moving between floors with a cut hidden in a lift. That was technically unprecedented and is still cited as the reference for that kind of staging. Chow Yun-fat plays a cop who plays jazz clarinet and carries a baby through a firefight, and the film means all of it. Woo’s slow motion and doves are operatic and not ironic. That’s exactly what every imitator gets wrong.
This is my favorite kind of action picture, the kind that means every drop of it.
American copies that borrow the doves and the slow motion and then wink so nobody thinks they care are a cheat. Woo cares, and so does Chow Yun-fat. A cop with a clarinet carrying a baby through a gunfight is absurd on paper, and I was with it all the way because nobody on screen treats it as a joke. That hospital take still makes most modern action look lazy.
Chow Yun-fat plays a cop who plays jazz clarinet and carries a baby through a firefight, and the film means all of it. This was Woo’s last Hong Kong film before Hollywood, and the grammar has been borrowed for thirty years without the sincerity.
15. In the Mood for Love (2000)
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"Two neighbors discover their spouses are having an affair, and do nothing about it."
In the Mood for Love is a film about restraint that’s itself restrained. That’s the harder version. Two neighbors in 1962 Hong Kong work out that their spouses are involved with each other, and respond by rehearsing conversations they’ll never have. The spouses are never shown. Not once, in the entire film. That means the audience only ever has the betrayed pair’s imagination of them, and the withholding is the subject instead of a technique applied to it. Wong shot it over fifteen months without a completed script and discarded most of what he filmed. The construction from corridors, doorways, staircases and repeated noodle runs is the residue of that process.
The spouses are never shown, not once, so the audience only ever has the betrayed pair’s imagination of them. Wong shot over fifteen months without a completed script and discarded most of what he filmed.
The corridors, doorways, staircases and repeated noodle runs are the residue of that process instead of a design.
16. Infernal Affairs (2002)
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"The source for The Departed, and it is tighter than the remake."
Infernal Affairs runs a hundred minutes against The Departed‘s hundred and fifty-one, and the compression is the argument for it. The premise is a machine: a policeman inside a triad and a triad inside the police, each tasked with finding the other. That situation generates its own scenes without decoration, and the film trusts it completely. The rooftop meetings, the Morse code tapping and the audio surveillance sequence are all produced by the premise and not invented around it. Tony Leung and Andy Lau share a single scene together before the final act. That’s the discipline the remake didn’t maintain.
It runs a hundred minutes against The Departed’s hundred and fifty-one, and the compression is the argument for it.
Tony Leung and Andy Lau share a single scene together before the final act. That’s the discipline the remake didn’t keep.
The rooftop meetings, the Morse code tapping and the audio surveillance are all produced by the premise and not invented around it.
17. A Separation (2011)
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"Nobody in it is lying and nobody is right, which is the hardest thing to write."
A Separation is the best-constructed screenplay on this list. It opens with a couple divorcing and expands into a legal dispute in which every participant has a defensible position and incomplete information, and not one of them is a villain. The mechanism is that the audience is given more than any character has. The viewer knows what the caregiver was doing, what the husband saw, and what the daughter overheard, so the tension is watching sincere people make reasonable decisions the audience can see are wrong.
Farhadi wrote it under Iranian censorship conditions that forbid a great deal, and the constraints produced a film in which class, religion and gender are all operating without any of them being stated. The audience is given more than any character has, which is the mechanism, so the tension is watching sincere people make reasonable decisions that are wrong. Farhadi wrote it under censorship conditions that forbid a great deal, and class, religion and gender all work without being stated.
It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the ending leaves the daughter’s choice unheard.
18. The Hunt (2012)
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"A false accusation, and the film never lets the town be simply wrong."
The Hunt is unbearable because it refuses to make the community stupid. A child who has repeated something she didn’t understand accuses a kindergarten teacher, and the film depicts the town’s response as protective and not as hysterical. Every adult behaves the way a responsible adult is supposed to behave when a child says something like that, and the result destroys an innocent man. There’s no villain and no point at which anybody could reasonably have acted differently.
Mikkelsen plays a man being erased politely. The final scene, a year later at a deer hunt, is a single gunshot from an unseen shooter, and the film ends without confirming that it’s over.
The Hunt was harder on me than any horror film on this page, and I rated it perfect anyway.
What makes me furious is that there’s nobody to be furious at. Every adult does the right thing and a decent man gets ground down regardless, and the film won’t hand me a villain to blame. That’s a special kind of hell to leave an audience in. Mikkelsen won that Cannes prize by never once begging for pity.
Mikkelsen won Best Actor at Cannes for playing a man being erased politely. The final scene, a year later at a deer hunt, is a single gunshot from an unseen shooter, and the film ends without confirming it’s over.
19. Sisu (2022) and Sisu: Road to Revenge (2025)
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"An old prospector, a bag of gold, and the last SS unit that should have left him alone."
Lapland, 1944. The retreating Germans are burning everything behind them, and an old Finnish prospector named Aatami Korpi has just struck gold. An SS detachment sees the gold and decides to take it. They should have kept walking. Jalmari Helander wrote and directed both films, and Jorma Tommila plays Korpi with almost no dialogue at all.
Helander frames Korpi as folklore. The Soviets called him Koschei the Deathless because they couldn’t kill him in the Winter War, and the film takes that literally. Once you accept that the man is something older than a soldier, the impossible survivals stop being plot holes and start being the point of the ride. I’ve watched each film twice, and neither one lost anything the second time.
On a $7 million budget, the first film made about $17 million, and the sequel went bigger.
Neither one wastes a frame. It’s a war film about a small nation’s fury at an occupier who burned its homes on the way out, told as a revenge story with a Finnish word at its heart that doesn’t translate. Ten out of ten.
20. Orpheus (1950)
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"Death has a chauffeur, a Rolls-Royce, and a radio that only poets can hear."
Jean Cocteau moved the Orpheus myth into post-war Paris and kept every bone of it.
Jean Marais plays Orphée as a celebrity poet losing ground to younger writers. María Casares plays the Princess, who is Death, and who falls in love with him. The underworld is a tribunal with paperwork. The Styx is a stretch of bombed-out ruins.
The images are the reason this is on the list. Orphée pressing his gloved hands into a mirror that turns to water. Cryptic lines of verse coming through a car radio from the other side. Cocteau did all of it with reverse footage and practical tricks on a small post-war budget, and seventy-five years later it still looks like nothing else.
It’s the middle film of his Orphic Trilogy and the easiest way in. Demy, Lynch and del Toro all learned something from it, and you can see where. You don’t need to know the myth to follow it. If you do know it, every change Cocteau made reads as an argument about love, fame and art. Nine out of ten.
21. Breathless (1960)
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"Godard broke continuity editing on purpose and the jump cut became a language."
Breathless is here for one technique that changed the grammar permanently. Godard had an overlong first cut, was told to remove twenty minutes, and instead of cutting scenes he cut inside them, leaving visible jumps.
That’s either a solution or a provocation depending on who is telling it, and Godard was happy to let both stand. The refusal to hide the edit is the defining gesture of the New Wave and is now available to every filmmaker as a deliberate choice. The plot is borrowed wholesale from American crime pictures and Truffaut supplied the story. Belmondo imitating Bogart in front of a cinema poster is the film explaining its own method.
Breathless gets a nine from me for sheer nerve.
A producer told Godard to lose twenty minutes, and he answered by chopping the insides of scenes and leaving the scars showing. That’s the cheekiest reply to a studio note I know of, and every jump cut makes me laugh. My small complaint is Belmondo’s Bogart act, which starts out charming and wears a little thin before the end.
The refusal to hide the edit is the defining gesture of the New Wave and is now available to every filmmaker as a deliberate choice.
Truffaut supplied the story and the plot is borrowed wholesale from American crime pictures.
22. Le Trou (1960)
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"A prison escape filmed in real time by a director who died before it opened."
Le Trou is the most patient film on this list. Five inmates dig out of La Santé prison and Becker films the work at close to real duration, including a concrete-breaking sequence that runs several minutes in an unbroken shot.
That decision is why it’s more tense than any thriller. The audience experiences how long it takes, how loud it is, and how many times they must stop, instead of being shown a montage of progress. It’s based on José Giovanni’s own escape attempt and Jean Keraudy, one of the actual participants, plays a version of himself and introduces the film to camera. Becker died before the release.
Becker films the concrete-breaking at close to real duration, including a sequence that runs several minutes in an unbroken shot.
It’s based on José Giovanni’s own escape attempt, and Jean Keraudy, one of the actual participants, plays a version of himself.
Becker died before the release. That’s why the film had no advocate at the time and took decades to be recognized.
23. The Exterminating Angel (1962)
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"The door is open. Nobody walks through it."
A dinner party of the city’s finest ends, and nobody leaves the music room.
There’s no lock and no wall. The doorway is open. Each guest drifts toward it, finds a reason to stay, and turns back. Days pass. The civilized veneer comes off one layer at a time, and Luis Buñuel watches it happen with the calm of a man who expected nothing better.
Buñuel refuses to explain it. No curse, no psychology, no reveal in the last reel.
He said he resisted every interpretation of the film, including his own. The bourgeoisie trapped by its own habits is the obvious reading, and it’s a good one, but the film works because you’re never allowed to settle on it.
He made it in Mexico, in exile from Franco’s Spain, and it won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes in 1962. The servants slip out before dinner ends, the only people in the house with any instinct for survival. That detail alone tells you whose side Buñuel is on. Nine out of ten.
24. Police Story (1985)
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"Jackie Chan established his entire template here, and the stunts nearly killed him."
Police Story is the film where Chan worked out what he was for. A Hong Kong officer protecting a witness, a shanty town destroyed by a car chase in the opening, and a shopping mall dismantled in the finale.
The pole slide is the sequence that defines him. He descended several storeys down a lightbulb-wrapped pole with no protection, burned his hands, dislocated his pelvis and injured his spine, and did it in one take because there was no second pole. The outtakes over the closing credits, showing the failures and the injuries, became his signature and are the most honest thing in any action filmography.
That pole slide terrifies me, and knowing what it did to his body makes it harder to watch. I admire a star who puts his own injuries in the credits, and I wish more action films had the guts to show the cost. My one quibble is the plot, which is mostly a clothesline for the set pieces, and I forgive it the moment the mall starts coming apart.
The opening shanty town chase destroyed a set built to be driven through.
The outtakes over the closing credits showing the failures and injuries became his signature and are the most honest thing in any action filmography.
25. Cinema Paradiso (1988)
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"A boy and a projectionist, and the censored kisses come back at the end."
Cinema Paradiso is the most commercially successful Italian art film of its decade and the ending is why. A director returns to the Sicilian village where he grew up and is left a reel by the projectionist who raised him.
The reel is every kiss the local priest ordered cut from every film across decades, spliced together and kept. It’s a gift, an apology and an argument about censorship delivered without a word of commentary.
The international cut is the better film. Tornatore’s original Italian version runs nearly three hours, includes a reunion with the lost love that explains too much, and failed at home before the shorter edit won the Academy Award.
The reel Alfredo leaves is every kiss the local priest ordered cut from every film across decades, spliced together and kept. The international cut is the better film, and Tornatore’s original Italian version runs nearly three hours and failed at home.
After the shorter edit was assembled, it won the Academy Award. That’s a rare case of an edit rescuing a picture.
26. Children of Heaven (1997)
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"A boy loses his sister’s shoes, and the film is about him trying not to win a race."
Children of Heaven builds enormous tension out of nothing at all. A boy loses his sister’s shoes, the family can’t afford replacements, and the two children share his pair by handing them over between school shifts. The climax inverts every sports film ever made. He enters a race because third prize is a pair of trainers. That means he must place exactly third, and the final sequence is a boy trying desperately not to win.
Majidi shot with children who hadn’t acted, in real neighborhoods, and the film was the first Iranian production nominated for an Academy Award. The climax inverts every sports film ever made, since third prize is a pair of trainers and he must place exactly third.
Majidi shot with children who hadn’t acted, in real neighborhoods, and it was the first Iranian production nominated for an Academy Award.
The shoes float away down a gutter in the opening. That’s the entire plot set in motion by an accident nobody could prevent.
27. Taste of Cherry (1997)
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"A man drives around Tehran looking for someone to bury him, and the ending breaks the film open."
Taste of Cherry is almost entirely conversations in a car. A man drives the hills outside Tehran seeking somebody willing to cover his body with earth after he takes his own life, and the film never explains why. The refusal to supply a reason is the point. Each passenger responds from their own position, religious or practical or moral, and the film declines to adjudicate between them. In its final sequence the film switches to grainy video and shows Kiarostami and the crew filming on the same hillside, soldiers relaxing between takes, the actor alive and smoking. It divides viewers completely and it won the Palme d’Or.
At the end it switches to grainy video and shows Kiarostami and the crew on the same hillside, with the actor alive and smoking. Each passenger responds from their own position, religious or practical or moral, and the film declines to adjudicate.
Winner of the Palme d’Or, it divides viewers completely, which the ending was designed to do.
28. Battle Royale (2000)
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"A school class is put on an island and made to kill each other, and Japan debated banning it."
Battle Royale isn’t a provocation and the reason is biographical. Fukasaku was fifteen during the war, working in a munitions factory that was bombed, and described diving under the bodies of classmates to survive and then being made to bury them.
At seventy he made this, about adults doing that to children deliberately, and the film’s anger is entirely legible once you know that. It was debated in the Diet and given a restrictive rating instead of the ban some members wanted.
Takeshi Kitano plays the teacher as a man so exhausted by young people that the atrocity is administrative to him. That’s more disturbing than any sadism would have been.
Fukasaku was fifteen during the war, working in a munitions factory that was bombed, and described diving under the bodies of classmates. He was seventy when he made this, about adults doing that to children deliberately, and the anger is legible once you know that.
People dismiss Battle Royale as shock cinema and they’re wrong, because the anger in it is earned.
A man who was made to bury his classmates at fifteen made a film about adults sacrificing children, and I feel that grief under every scene. Kitano’s bored teacher frightens me more than any of the violence. My small complaint is the size of the class, since a few of the students blur together before they’re killed off.
29. A Bittersweet Life (2005)
► Read the full review of A Bittersweet Life (2005)
"An enforcer makes one small merciful decision and the organization destroys him for it."
A Bittersweet Life is the most stylish Korean crime film of its decade and the structure is brutally simple. A hotel manager and fixer is told to watch his boss’s girlfriend and report infidelity, declines to report it, and everything follows from that. The mercy is never explained and Lee Byung-hun plays it as a man who doesn’t understand his own decision either. He’s not in love with her and the film refuses to supply a motive. The violence is punishing and not choreographed. He’s buried alive, escapes, and the final sequence is a man who has lost everything asking why, and being told it was nothing.
The mercy is never explained and Lee Byung-hun plays it as a man who doesn’t understand his own decision either.
He’s not in love with her and the film refuses to supply a motive. That’s what makes the consequence unbearable.
He’s buried alive, escapes, and the final sequence is a man who has lost everything asking why and being told it was nothing.
30. Mesrine (2008)
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"Two films about a criminal who became famous and then believed it."
Mesrine runs across two films and the subject is self-invention and not crime. Jacques Mesrine went from Algeria through bank robbery and prison escapes to becoming France’s public enemy number one, and built the persona deliberately.
The second film is about a man performing a character the press wrote for him, giving interviews, publishing a memoir from a cell, and escalating to stay newsworthy.
Cassel gained and lost major weight across the shoot and the opening split-screen of the 1979 ambush, shown before the story begins, means the audience watches two films knowing exactly how they end.
Cassel gained and lost heavy weight across the shoot. That ran across two films made back to back.
Before the story begins, the film shows the opening split-screen of the 1979 ambush, so the audience watches two films knowing how they end. The second film is about a man performing a character the press wrote for him, giving interviews and publishing a memoir from a cell.
31. A Touch of Sin (2013)
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"Four true stories of violence in contemporary China, told without commentary."
A Touch of Sin assembles four incidents that were reported on Chinese social media before being removed, covering official corruption, migrant labor, a sauna worker and a factory suicide at Foxconn.
The structural decision is to refuse to connect them. Four people in four provinces reach the same point independently, and the film makes no argument about causation because the pattern does the arguing.
Jia had been a state-approved director and the film was never released in China despite approval. That’s a more eloquent response than a ban would have been.
The four incidents were reported on Chinese social media before being removed, covering official corruption, migrant labor, a sauna worker and a Foxconn suicide. Jia refuses to connect them, so four people in four provinces reach the same point independently.
China never released it despite approval. That’s a more eloquent response than a ban would have been.
32. The Wailing (2016)
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"A rural Korean horror film that never tells you who was right."
The Wailing is constructed so that a second viewing is a different film. A village policeman investigates an illness and a series of killings, with a Japanese stranger, a shaman and a woman in white all offering incompatible accounts of what is happening.
The film plants evidence for three readings equally and endorses none. That means a viewer’s interpretation depends entirely on which character they decided to trust and when.
The protagonist’s failure is a failure of belief. He’s asked to wait and doesn’t, and the film is explicit that the waiting was the test.
Most horror gets cold feet and explains itself in the last ten minutes.
The Wailing won’t, and it left me arguing with myself about who to trust long after the credits. The shaman sequence alone is worth the running time. My only reservation is that the policeman is so hapless for so long that my patience with him ran out before the film made his failure matter.
The protagonist’s failure is a failure of belief, not of investigation, and the film is explicit that the waiting was the test. The shaman ritual sequence, cut against an exorcism happening at the same time, runs nearly ten minutes and is the best staged material in Korean horror.
33. The Mother and the Whore (1973)
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"Three and a half hours of talking, and it was the most discussed European film of its moment."
The Mother and the Whore is the definitive document of the hangover after May 1968. A man and two women in Paris talk at enormous length about desire, freedom and the disappointment of having been promised something. Eustache scripted every word, including what sounds improvised, and the performances were required to deliver it exactly. It runs three hours and thirty-eight minutes and is demanding and not difficult for effect. It was unavailable for decades because of rights disputes following Eustache’s suicide in 1981, which built a reputation the restoration has mostly supported. Eustache scripted every word, including what sounds improvised, and the performances were required to deliver it exactly. It runs three hours and thirty-eight minutes and is the definitive document of the hangover after May 1968. It was unavailable for decades because of rights disputes following Eustache’s suicide in 1981, which built a reputation the restoration has mostly supported.
34. Audition (1999)
► Read the full review of Audition (1999)
"A romantic drama for an hour, and then it is not."
Audition works because the first hour was made sincerely and not as a runway. A widower stages fake film auditions to find a new wife, which is already an ugly premise, and the film plays it as a gentle character study.
Miike doesn’t signal. There’s no ominous score, no foreshadowing beyond one shot, and viewers who walked in unaware have reported the turn as traumatic. Walkouts at its festival screenings are documented. Few sequences in horror are as notorious as the final act, and the film’s actual subject is the casual cruelty of the audition premise itself, which the last twenty minutes answers directly.
Audition deserves its eight, and I’d think hard before recommending it to most people. The gentle first hour and the nasty turn both get Miike’s full commitment, and I respect that. My reservation is that the last twenty minutes are so punishing they can drown out the film’s point about the cruelty of the fake auditions. I suspect plenty of viewers walk out remembering the pain and forgetting the argument.
A gentle character study occupies the first hour, made sincerely and not as a runway. That’s why the turn registers as a betrayal by the world.
The film’s actual subject is the casual cruelty of the audition premise, which the last twenty minutes answers directly.
It frustrates me that so many of these films sit unwatched because of a line of text at the bottom of the screen. They invented most of what Hollywood drama and action still lean on, and they did it with more heart than the copies ever managed. Put on Bicycle Thieves or High and Low tonight and give it twenty minutes before you decide.
