A cross section of the last seven decades of international cinema, this lineup of past winners of the Academy Award for best foreign-language film includes masterpieces by titans like Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Luis Buñuel; hot-button political thrillers ripped from the headlines in Greece and Argentina; high-water marks of the Czechoslovak New Wave; a Soviet epic of unparalleled scale; and, of course, a handful of left-field surprises (it is the Academy Awards, after all).
Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1950 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyo, Masayuki Mori
A riveting psychological thriller that investigates the nature of truth and the meaning of justice, RASHOMON is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made. Four people give different accou...
Directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa • 1953 • Japan
A winner of Academy Awards for best foreign-language film and best costume design, Gate of Hell is a visually sumptuous, psychologically penetrating work from Teinosuke Kinugasa. In the midst of epic, violent intrigue in twelfth-century Japan, an imp...
Directed by Federico Fellini • 1954 • Italy
There has never been a face quite like that of Giulietta Masina. Her husband, the legendary Federico Fellini, directs her as Gelsomina in La strada, the film that launched them both to international stardom. Gelsomina is sold by her mother into the e...
Directed by Federico Fellini • 1957 • Italy
Starring Giulietta Masina, François Périer
Giulietta Masina won Best Actress at Cannes as the title character of one of Fellini’s most haunting films. Oscar winner for best foreign-language film, NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (LE NOTTI DI CABIRIA) is the tragic st...
Directed by Jacques Tati • 1958 • France, Italy
Slapstick prevails again when Jacques Tati's eccentric, old-fashioned hero, Monsieur Hulot, is set loose in Villa Arpel, the geometric, oppressively ultramodern home of his brother-in-law, and in the antiseptic plastic hose factory where he gets a ...
Directed by Marcel Camus • 1959 • Brazil, France
Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or, Marcel Camus' Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival...
Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1960 • Sweden
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Ingmar Bergman's THE VIRGIN SPRING is a harrowing tale of faith, revenge, and savagery in medieval Sweden. Starring frequent Bergman collaborator and screen icon Max von Sydow, the film is both...
Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1961 • Sweden
While vacationing on a remote island retreat, a family's already fragile ties are tested when daughter Karin (Harriet Andersson) discovers her father has been using her schizophrenia for his own literary means. As she drifts in and out of lucidity, the ...
Directed by Federico Fellini • 1963 • Italy
Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life. One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (Otto e mezzo) turns one man's artistic crisis into a grand...
Directed by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos • 1965 • Czechoslovakia
Starring Idá Kaminská, Josef Kroner, František Zvarík
An inept Slovak peasant is torn between greed and guilt when the Nazi-backed bosses of his town appoint him “Aryan controller” of an old Jewish widow’s button shop. Humor and traged...
Directed by Jiří Menzel • 1966 • Czechoslovakia
Starring Václav Neckář, Josef Somr, Vlastimil Brodský
At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Oblivious to the war and the resistance that surrounds h...
ANDREI BOLKONSKY
Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk • 1966 • Soviet Union
At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet film industry set out to prove it could outdo Hollywood with a production that would dazzle the world: a titanic, awe-inspiring adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic tome in which the fates o...
NATASHA ROSTOVA
Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk • 1966 • Soviet Union
At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet film industry set out to prove it could outdo Hollywood with a production that would dazzle the world: a titanic, awe-inspiring adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic tome in which the fates of...
THE YEAR 1812
Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk • 1967 • Soviet Union
At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet film industry set out to prove it could outdo Hollywood with a production that would dazzle the world: a titanic, awe-inspiring adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic tome in which the fates of t...
PIERRE BEZUKHOV
Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk • 1967 • Soviet Union
At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet film industry set out to prove it could outdo Hollywood with a production that would dazzle the world: a titanic, awe-inspiring adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic tome in which the fates of...
Directed by Costa-Gavras • 1969 • Algeria, France
A pulse-pounding political thriller, Greek expatriate director Costa-Gavras's Z was one of the cinematic sensations of the late sixties, and remains among the most vital dispatches from that hallowed era of filmmaking. This Academy Award winner -...
Directed by Luis Buñuel • 1972 • France
Starring Fernando Rey, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Paul Frankeur
In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and ima...
Directed by Federico Fellini • 1973 • France, Italy
This carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy during the fascist period, the most personal film from Federico Fellini, satirizes the director's youth and turns daily life into a circus of social rituals, adolescent desires, male fantasies,...
Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1975 • Soviet Union, Japan
The Russian army sends an explorer on an expedition to the snowy Siberian wilderness where he makes friends with a seasoned local hunter.
Directed by Volker Schlöndorff • 1979 • Germany
Oskar is born in Germany in 1924 with an advanced intellect. Repulsed by the hypocrisy of adults and the irresponsibility of society, he refuses to grow older after his third birthday. While the chaotic world around him careens toward the madness...
Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1982 • Sweden
Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden. Ingmar Bergman intended Fanny and Alexander as his swan song, and it is the leg...
Directed by Luis Puenzo • 1985 • Argentina
Starring Héctor Alterio, Norma Aleandro, Chunchuna Villafañe
The aftereffects of Argentina's Dirty War-during which tens of thousands of civilians were murdered under the military dictatorship-hit close to home for the wife of a government official as s...
Directed by Gabriel Axel • 1987 • Denmark
At once a rousing paean to artistic creation, a delicate evocation of divine grace, and the ultimate film about food, the Oscar-winning BABETTE’S FEAST is a deeply beloved treasure of cinema. Directed by Gabriel Axel and adapted from a story by Isak Di...
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino • 2013 • Italy
For decades, journalist Jep Gambardella has charmed and seduced his way through the glittering nightlife of Rome. Since the legendary success of his only novel, he has been a permanent fixture in the city's literary and elite social circles. But on h...
