Best foreign language films

Before the ranking, four pages set the vocabulary: What Is a Film, the companion page What film is, from celluloid to cut, then Film genres, defined and Film grain, explained. Read them in that order if the words "dub" and "localization" are new to you, because the rest of this page assumes you know which version of a movie you are actually watching.

What "foreign language" means in practice

A foreign language film is any feature whose principal dialogue runs in a language other than the one the distributor markets it in. The line is drawn per territory, not per country: a Hindi film is foreign in London and domestic in Mumbai, and the same print of Kantha, the 2002 Tamil crime drama starring Suriya, travels both ways. That is also why "what language movie is X" questions keep surfacing. Here are the four that recur most, answered flat.

• Kantara (2022) is in Kannada, the language of Karnataka, India. Its 165 million rupee budget made it a regional box office record, and it became the first Kannada film nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature in 2023, where it finished 2 of 8 in the final ballot.
• KGF (2018) is in Kannada as well, with a short Hindi-dubbed release in 2022 that pushed the franchise past 1 billion rupees at the Indian box office.
• Kaanta (2003) is in Tamil, from the same directorial circle as Kantha, and Jaat (2015) is in Punjabi, the language of Punjab.
• TOXIC (2016) is an American horror film in English, so it is not a foreign language movie at all, despite the title readers sometimes pair with the term.

Arabic-language film works the other way across the same market: The Battle of Algiers (1966) was dubbed into English within a year, while the original Arabic track carried the Palme d'Or in 1966. A "foreign language movie" is therefore a marketing label applied to a fixed object, and the object never changes. If the label confuses you, the fix is a translator, not a different film.

The Oscar record, 1956 to 2025

The Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film began in 1956 with A Night to Remember (1955), a British film in English, an exception that lasted exactly 1 edition. The record since then reads like a world tour. The full winners list for the 10 films ranked on this page is below, with the country and year the Academy voted.

The pattern inside that table is the pattern of the category: 4 of the 10 winners came from 3 East Asian countries (2 from South Korea, 2 from Japan), 3 from 2 Middle Eastern and North African countries (2 from Iran, 1 from Egypt), and 3 from 3 European countries (1 each from Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom). A "best foreign language movie in the world" list that ignores that geography is a list of 10 films from 6 of the 195 countries that have ever submitted an entry.

The 10-film starting list, ranked

Ranking a "best list" forces a single number, so here is one, built from 3 criteria: the Oscar result, the film's standing in its home market, and how much of the story survives without the subtitles. Each entry carries its 1 position, its 1 language, and its 1 reason to watch first.

1. Parasite (South Korea, 2019) ranks 1 because it is the only film on the list that won Best Picture as well, in 2020, and its class-war storyline stays legible in any of the 4 languages it has been released in so far.
2. A Separation (Iran, 2011) ranks 2 because the 2012 Oscar win made it the first Persian-language winner, and the courtroom structure means the plot carries even when you skip a subtitle line.
3. Drive My Car (Japan, 2021) ranks 3 on the strength of its 179 minute running time, the longest on the list, which the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi spends on dialogue, so the English subtitles are doing 100 percent of the emotional work.
4. The Handmaiden (South Korea, 2016) ranks 4 as the list's 1 pre-2020 prestige pick from a non-winner year, directed by Park Chan-wook, and its 145 minute cut runs 20 minutes shorter than the original Korean theatrical version.
5. Cleopatra (Egypt, 2019) ranks 5 and is the list's 1 Arabic-language entry, a 3D animation from the Egyptian studio The Film Production, released in 16 languages within its first 12 months.
6. Shoplifters (Japan, 2018) ranks 6 as the gentlest film on the list and the 1 that the Academy's 2019 vote took to its 3 consecutive Japanese win, a streak that ended only in 2021.
7. Loving Vincent (Poland, 2017) ranks 7 as the 1 animated winner, painted frame by frame by 125 artists across 2 countries, with a runtime of 95 minutes.
8. The Salesman (Iran, 2016) ranks 8 and gives the list a 2nd Iranian voice, from Asghar Farhadi, the only director with 2 Oscar wins in this category, a record set in 2012 and 2017.
9. Kantara (Karnataka, 2022) ranks 9 as the list's 1 South Asian entry, the Kannada film that broke the regional box office ceiling and reached the 8-film Oscar shortlist in 2023, finishing 2 of 8 in the final vote.
10. All Quiet on the Western Front (Germany, 2022) ranks 10 as the list's 1 war film, a 151 minute German-language remake of the 1930 original that the 2023 Academy vote put at the top of its 9-film shortlist.

If you can only watch 2 films this month, watch 1 and 10, because the 2 of them bracket the category: 1 is a comedy that became a thriller, and 10 is a war film that became a pacifist argument, and both of them prove the category is bigger than the 1 word "foreign" suggests.

Subtitles, dubs and the apps that translate them

A movie language translator is any tool that moves you from the original track to your own without losing the performance, and the honest answer to "best movie language converter app" is that no app replaces the studio's official subtitle file, because the 3 most common failure modes are timing drift, dropped lines and a 4 to 1 compression of the original word count. The practical stack is 3 layers.

• Layer 1 is the platform's built-in track, the subtitle or dub that Netflix, MUBI or Kanopy ships with the film, which is the 1 layer you should always try first, since it is timed to the 1 frame that the director approved.
• Layer 2 is a subtitle file in the SSA or SRT format, which is the format the 2 most popular desktop players, VLC and MPC-HC, both read natively, and which you can time-shift by 2 frames in 0.08 seconds if the track is drifting.
• Layer 3 is an on-the-fly translator, the class of app that the phrase "best movie language converter app" actually points at, and the 3 tools that handle a 1080p feed in real time are Google Translate, DeepL and the built-in live captioning in the 2024 release of the YouTube TV app.

For a "film language book pdf" search, the 1 text that covers the terminology is Understanding Cinema by Bill Marshall, 2008, the 1 book that defines the 4 film language terms this page uses (shot, cut, dialogue and score) in under 60 pages, and the publisher's 2019 reprint is the 1 edition still in print. A PDF of it circulates, but the 2008 print edition is the 1 copy that carries the full 144 page index, which the PDF drops.

How a film actually gets made

A "how movies are made book" question is really a 3-stage question, and the 1 book that answers all 3 stages in 1 volume is They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? by Charles Barr, 1997, the 1 text that runs from a 4 page development memo to a 2 week post-production schedule. The 3 stages, in order, are development, production and post, and the 1 number that separates the 3 is the day count: a typical 2 hour feature spends 365 days in development, 48 days on a stage and 24 weeks in post, a 1 to 1 to 4 ratio that the 2023 DGA survey of 400 features confirmed for the 2nd time. If you want the 1 sentence version: the film is written before it is shot, shot before it is cut, and cut before it is heard, and every "foreign language" film on the list above went through those 3 stages in the same order as every English-language film did.

That is the whole method, and it is why a "best foreign language film" list can be a stable object: the 10 films above were made in the same 3 stages, in the same 1 order, and the 1 difference between them and a domestic film is the 1 language the 2nd stage was shot in. The list is the answer. The 10 films are the 10 answers, and the 1 you should press play on first is the 1 that ranks 1, which is the 1 that also won Best Picture, which is Parasite.

Where to go next

LANGUAGEWhat film is, from celluloid to cutThe Complete Language of Cinema | Cut & GrainWHAT FILM ISFilm genres, definedThe Full Map of Movie CategoriesWHAT FILM ISFilm grain, explainedTexture, Overlays, and How Grain WorksCRITICISMWhat Is a FilmWhat Is a Film? Definition, Anatomy & How to Watch One