Five Foreign Films for Novices: A Sample of Foreign Movies for the Uninitiated

How paradoxical that America, a melting pot of nations, gets so set in its ways on certain points of multiculturalism. Like movies, for instance. People watch American movies all over the world, but how many foreign films has the average American seen?

There’s a certain undeserved stigma floating around the notion ‘foreign film’. Take it in the wrong context and you may imagine three hours of grainy black-and-white images narrated in droning, depressed French. But in reality, foreign movies can be very much like our own even when they’re different. So why not begin your journey into European or Asian movies with a selection that gives you something familiar to hold onto? Films that are as rooted in traditional Hollywood cinema as they are in their own cultures. You can have the best of both worlds.

Here’s a sampler platter of five foreign films, all from different countries, that can serve as a gateway into watching, analyzing, and, yes, enjoying national cinema from around the world, even if the closest you’ve ever been to watching a foreign movie is flipping past Telemundo. You don’t have to be a film student or a well-traveled globetrotter to get into them. Just human.

You can get them all without much fuss from any major video chain or online sources like Netflix. Just be sure to watch them in their original language where applicable. Reading subtitles seems like work at first, but don’t worry, you’ll get into it, and it’s far better to get the original dialogue than an awkward English dub. You’ll thank yourself later.

(1) “Amelie” – France