David Fear

When South Korean director Bong Joon Ho collected his Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film for Parasite, in 2019, he teased the audience for its hesitancy to embrace international filmmaking. ‘Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles’, he said, ‘you will be introduced to so many more amazing films’. Indeed, many of the greatest movies ever made were produced in non-English-speaking countries, and there is no need for any fan of cinema to be intimidated by them.  |Sure, you may encounter big themes and a fair bit of philosophy. But you’ll also find pulse-racing action flicks, silly comedies, charming musicals and stylish thrillers, as well as movies that might feel oddly familiar because, well, they probably directly influenced the movies you already love. In compiling this list of the best foreign films of all-time, We omitted silent films and determined that the movies had to be in a language that wasn’t English: so goodbye Britain and Australia, we’ll see you elsewhere. Other than those caveats, consider this your travel guide to the wide, wonderful world of international film. Written by David Fear, Keith Uhlich, Andy Kryza, Joshua Rothkopf & Matthew Singer  Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🇫🇷 The 100 best French movies of all-time, ranked🇰🇷 The best Korean movies of all-time🥋 The 25 best martial arts movies of all-time 

For non-fans, sports might seem trivial – frivolous games played by millionaires who make more money than teachers and doctors. On the surface, those detractors aren’t entirely wrong. But if you look closer, sports are also a natural conduit for drama, for triumphant displays of the human spirit and, sometimes, for reminders that things don’t always turn out the way we want them.  Clearly, it’s no surprise why filmmakers often look to sports for inspiration. Sure, it’s a genre built on clichés. But the best sports movies are able to surprise us, either by turning the tropes inside-out or delivering them with such emotional authenticity, they punch audiences in the hearts regardless. On this list of the 50 greatest sports movies of all-time, you’ll find examples of both. Scotchgard your couch, because you’re going to be jumping on it a lot. RECOMMENDED:🤾 The best Olympics movies to get you in the Olympic Spirit🌊 The 15 most epic surf movies🔎 The best biopics of all-time, ranked

If we’re being honest, not all the kids are all right. In fact, some are downright rude. Murderous, even. Yes, to be young is to feel the weight of society’s expectations on your shoulders, but the young people on our list of cinema’s most memorable depictions of youth in revolt aren’t just your average angsty adolescents. To be frank, many of them are irredeemable assholes. But that doesn’t mean we can’t catch a vicarious thrill from watching their exploits, and recall the days when we ourselves were young, dumb and angry at the world, rather than old, tired and resigned. We’ve ranked these movies as a countdown of bad behaviour, from mildly obnoxious to the straight-up criminal. Our only parameter: they must be teens and younger, not twentysomethings.    Recommended: 🧒 The 100 best teen movies of all-time😍 The best teen romance movies of all-time 🤯 The most controversial movies of all-time😬 The best thriller movies of all-time

Naturally, there are a lot of movies set in Los Angeles – it’s literally where American movies come from, after all. And yet, ‘LA movies’ seem less exalted than, say, New York movies or Paris movies. Maybe it’s because the city is harder to romanticise than other major cities, what with all the traffic, cosmetic tweakments and obsession with kale. Whatever the reason, it makes coming up with a list of truly great LA movies a tough task. But the great ones are really great. In terms of tone and subject matter, they’re as sprawling as the landscape itself, covering everything from showbiz dramas and inner-city thrillers to fizzy musical comedies and shadowy noirs. Here are our all-time favourites. Recommended: 🗽 The 101 best New York movies of all time🌭 The 27 best Chicago movies of all time💂 The 32 best London movies of all time🥖 The 54 best movies set in Paris

To the victor goes the spoils – and to the losers goes the social media outrage. That’s effectively how the Oscars operate. As the actual telecast honours the year’s standout cinematic performances, viewers jump on Twitter to express righteous anger over just how wrong the voters got it. It makes sense: the Academy has screwed up often enough that you almost expect it to happen half the time. Every once in a while, though, the Academy gets it spot-on – and those instances deserve recognition. Here are 50 times when they nailed the bullseye. Recommended: 👎 The 20 worst Oscar winners in history👍 The best films of 2022🙌 The most anticipated movies coming out in 2023🔥 The 100 best movies of all time

To mark the much-anticipated return of Mad Men to the small screen (its sixth-season premiere airs Sunday, April 7 at 9pm on AMC), we’ve compiled the most quintessentially Gotham series of all time. What makes one of NYC’s best television shows, you ask? It could be a number of things—characters with particularly New York attitudes, nontouristy shooting locations, authentic period details—but we should note that we’ve excluded any locally shot news and chat shows. (Sorry, The Daily Show and vintage Conan.) If any omissions rub you the wrong way, like our decision to leave off Sex and the City (we’re kidding!), let us know in the comments.

You're used to things beginning with an audible bang when you schlep into Utah's Park City, parka-clad and pleasantly buzzed from the oxygen-thin altitude, to celebrate the ten days of marathon filmgoing and blitz-marketing known as the Sundance Film Festival. One or two big-name titles start things off with gala premieres on the fest's first Thursday night. Red carpets get rolled out. Flashbulbs go off. Famous faces break into smiles. Crowds squeal. But though the 2011 edition kicked off its usual to-do at the cavernous Eccles Theater with celebrities—notably Harry Belafonte, the subject of the docuportrait Sing My Song—and audience members with tickets were allegedly turned away at the door, the fact that films had already started screening during the day gave the evening a slightly already-in-progress feeling. The first Dramatic Competition film to screen at the Eccles was not a star-studded affair, but a scrappy slice-of-life drama named Pariah—the sort of earnest, regional low-budget indie that would have fit in with Sundance's lineup 25 years ago. It was, by many accounts, a mellow beginning for what can be a maelstrom-filled affair, suggesting the tone for '11 would be, hey, like, chill out. This year's official symbol is a delicate snowflake; "Be there" is the motto. Um, where else would we be? So you can imagine the sigh of relief that came from the great unshaven masses of film journalists when we showed up to our inaugural press screening and it resembled the cacop

The flying statue of Jesus, hovering over Rome via helicopter; Anita Ekberg, voluptuously traipsing around the Trevi Fountain; that climactic metaphor of a bloated, beached sea creature, staring dead-eyed at Marcello Mastroianni's fatigued urban Candide. It's so easy to reduce Federico Fellini's three-ring satire of the Euro-chic ‘good life’ to iconic scenes, or to accept the movie simply as a canonized classic (of course it's great; they teach it in college courses!), that you can forget what a damning indictment of This Mondo Modern World it really is. Yes, Film Forum's two-week revival of il maestro's groundbreaking work should be considered mandatory attendance anyway, given that this new 35mm restoration is gorgeous; the movie's aristocratic filth has never looked so pristine. But the real reason to wallow once more in its parade of faux Madonnas and real whores, rich junkies and jerkwads, parasitic paparazzi (a term the film coined), dim-bulb starlets, drunken louts and the lowest of the low – that'd be journalists – is to recognise, with stunning clarity, the morally bankrupt, media-fried here and now. Historians can laud it as the transitional pause before the director fully abandoned any neorealistic flourishes and dove into the psycho-personal surrealism known as the Fellini-esque. Yet everyone else will simply admire, in slack-jawed stupor, the way this 51-year-old time capsule thoroughly predicts the era of TMZ, Paris Hilton and celebutante overload. Everything ha

Unless you caught Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 moody martial-arts flick during a blink-and-ya-missed-it run at your local Chinatown theater, the only way to see this whacked-out wuxia was on DVD. But with all due respect to Tai Seng, the San Francisco company that’s sporadically released Ashes of Time on various home-video formats, the joy of locating a copy was always followed by a buzzkill. The source print appeared to have been excavated from a sandpaper factory and the murky transfer made you wonder whether your TV screen needed a Windex wipe-down. Even the film’s creator couldn’t find a complete negative in decent condition. But thankfully, Wong has pieced together what he calls a “definitive” cut, unleashing a spruced-up Redux version of his swords-slinger drama. The auteur trimmed seven minutes to tighten the pace and added a new score from renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, but it’s the reworking of the film’s visuals that signals the true difference. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s imagery is not only crystal clear now, but has also been digitally color-coded for maximum Day-Glo effect. Travelers wander under key-lime green skies, and blade-wielding warriors battle before psychedelic lemon-meringue hills. To call this new Ashes gorgeous and retina-searing is an understatement; you may want to schedule a postscreening ophthalmologist appointment. Does the fresh coat of pixel paint make the film’s labyrinthine plot about an assassin (Leslie Cheung), his clients and their various lo