What qual­i­fies as a “for­eign-lan­guage film” is in the ear of the behold­er, even if the glob­al dom­i­nance of Hol­ly­wood effec­tive­ly makes the cat­e­go­ry refer to any film in a lan­guage oth­er than Eng­lish. The sheer cul­tur­al and lin­guis­tic diver­si­ty in world cin­e­ma can seem to ren­der the term too all-encom­pass­ing to be of much crit­i­cal use. From the point of view of cinema’s purest, ear­li­est aspirations—to be an inter­na­tion­al visu­al lan­guage that tran­scends lin­guis­tic barriers—emphasizing spo­ken lan­guage dif­fer­ences can seem to miss the point of filmic art.

On the oth­er hand, these days mul­ti-mil­lion-dol­lar pop­corn block­busters are cre­at­ed with inter­na­tion­al audi­ences fore­most in mind. But that impulse, too—purely, venal­ly, commercial—doesn’t begin to get at what makes film both a cul­tur­al­ly spe­cif­ic and a uni­ver­sal medi­um.

We go to the movies to be enter­tained, but also to be shocked, sur­prised, intrigued, to be let in on the lives of peo­ple we might nev­er meet. Inter­na­tion­al film, even in its most exper­i­men­tal devi­a­tions, respects the uni­ver­sal con­ven­tions that give audi­ences entry to those lives, no mat­ter what lan­guage they hear.

It is no emp­ty say­ing that “the lan­guage of film is uni­ver­sal,” as the BBC writes in the intro­duc­tion to its list of “The 100 Great­est For­eign-Lan­guage Films.” Nor is it con­tra­dic­to­ry to also point out that “the cin­e­ma of an indi­vid­ual nation is inevitably tied to its unique iden­ti­ty and his­to­ry.” The lat­ter qual­i­ty is what makes non-West­ern film chal­leng­ing, even for­bid­ding, for view­ers with more insu­lar per­spec­tives. The for­mer is what makes world cin­e­ma acces­si­ble to them nonethe­less.

If you’ve some­how avoid­ed see­ing some of the world’s great­est “for­eign-lan­guage films”—for rea­sons of sub­ti­tle-aver­sion or oth­er­wise, it’s nev­er too late to over­come your resis­tance and dis­cov­er how the cul­tur­al rich­ness of world cin­e­ma still speaks an inter­na­tion­al lan­guage. And you can hard­ly go wrong with the BBC list as a guide. Com­piled by 209 crit­ics from 43 dif­fer­ent coun­tries who speak a total of 41 dif­fer­ent lan­guages, the list seems about as inclu­sive as it gets, with some qual­i­fi­ca­tions.

“French can claim to be the inter­na­tion­al lan­guage of acclaimed cin­e­ma,” with 27 of the high­est-rat­ed films in that lan­guage, “fol­lowed by 12 in Man­darin, and 11 each in Ital­ian and Japan­ese.” A full quar­ter of the list of films come from East Asia—Japan, Chi­na, Tai­wan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. “If there’s any­thing dis­ap­point­ing about the final list,” the BBC notes, “it’s the pauci­ty of films direct­ed or co-direct­ed by women,” just four out of 100. But female crit­ics made up 45 per­cent of the respon­dents.

Just below see the first ten films on the list. Per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly, Aki­ra Kuro­sawa makes the top ten twice, with Sev­en Samu­rai at num­ber one and Rashomon com­ing in at num­ber four. Kuro­sawa “was loved by crit­ics every­where,” except, per­haps sur­pris­ing­ly, in Japan, where the six crit­ics who vot­ed “didn’t go for a sin­gle Kuro­sawa film between them,” a reminder that film may be uni­ver­sal but crit­i­cism is not. Or as the great John Car­pen­ter once put it, “In France, I’m an auteur. In Eng­land, I’m a hor­ror movie direc­tor. In Ger­many, I’m a film­mak­er. In the U.S., I’m a bum.”

You can dive into the full list of top 100 “for­eign-lan­guage” films at the BBC here.

1. Sev­en Samu­rai (Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, 1954)
2. Bicy­cle Thieves (Vit­to­rio de Sica, 1948)
3. Tokyo Sto­ry (Yasu­jirô Ozu, 1953)
4. Rashomon (Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, 1950)
5. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
6. Per­sona (Ing­mar Bergman, 1966)
7. 8 1/2 (Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, 1963)
8. The 400 Blows (François Truf­faut, 1959)
9. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
10. La Dolce Vita (Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, 1960)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 10 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 846 Film Crit­ics

The Top 100 Amer­i­can Films of All Time, Accord­ing to 62 Inter­na­tion­al Film Crit­ics

The Best 100 Movies of the 21st Cen­tu­ry (So Far) Named by 177 Film Crit­ics

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

“Who’s afraid of Robert Bres­son?” New York­er film crit­ic Antho­ny Lane once asked. “Me, for a start.” But he did­n’t mean that he dread­ed screen­ings of Au hasard Balt­haz­ar, Diary of a Coun­try Priest, A Man Escaped, The Dev­il, Prob­a­bly, or any oth­er acclaimed work in the auteur’s fil­mog­ra­phy. “It’s not that I don’t look for­ward to a Bres­son pic­ture,” Lane clar­i­fied. “It’s just that as I shuf­fle into the the­atre I feel like a pupil approach­ing the prin­ci­pal’s door, won­der­ing what crimes I may have com­mit­ted and how I must answer for them.”

Even now, 35 years after his final pic­ture, Bres­son intim­i­dates with his rig­or — rig­or of the moral vari­ety, cer­tain­ly, but even more so of the aes­thet­ic vari­ety — often described (not least by the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky) in the terms of asceti­cism. Nev­er­the­less, Indiewire offers a brief and friend­ly intro­duc­tion to his cin­e­ma in the three-minute video essay at the top of the post.

Just above, in “Robert Bres­son: The Essence of Cin­e­ma,” A‑Bit­ter­Sweet-Life gets deep­er into the Bres­son­ian sen­si­bil­i­ty by show­ing clips of his films along­side clips of him work­ing and speak­ing, all nar­rat­ed with his own words.

“I always like to see and hear the film before I shoot it, to come up with things by work­ing on my own, things from my mem­o­ry or imag­i­na­tion, even if I don’t end up film­ing them,” Bres­son says in one piece of inter­view footage. “These are often things I can’t come up with on the set, so I believe it’s impor­tant to cre­ate a sol­id ground­work, a set of con­straints with­in which the film will take shape. Because I’m aware of these con­straints, I can ask my actors, non­pro­fes­sion­al actors, to sur­prise me. Unlim­it­ed sur­pris­es but with­in a lim­it­ed con­text.”

Those worlds will sound famil­iar to any­one who has read Notes sur le ciné­matographe (var­i­ous­ly trans­lat­ed as Notes on Cin­e­matog­ra­phy or Notes on the Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er), Bres­son’s col­lec­tion of max­ims lay­ing out his view of his art. If obser­va­tions like “To set up a film is to bind per­sons to each oth­er and to objects by looks,” “Emp­ty the pond to get the fish,” and “Be sure of hav­ing used to the full all that is com­mu­ni­cat­ed by immo­bil­i­ty and silence” seem abstract on the page, Film­scalpel’s “Notes on Pick­pock­et” illus­trates their enor­mous rel­e­vance to the effec­tive­ness of Bres­son’s work by weav­ing them direct­ly into scenes of one of his best-known works.

Film schol­ar David Bor­d­well exam­ines the same movie, but takes a much less apho­ris­tic and much more tech­ni­cal tack, in “Con­struc­tive Edit­ing in Robert Bresson’s Pick­pock­et,” which con­tex­tu­al­izes Bres­son’s tech­nique of con­struc­tive edit­ing, or build­ing a space while show­ing only small pieces of it at a time, as opposed to “ana­lyt­i­cal edit­ing” that first estab­lish­es the entire space and then moves with­in it. Just above, crit­ic and well-known Bres­son enthu­si­ast James Quant breaks down the much lat­er L’Ar­gent — or at least its use of reflec­tions and rep­e­ti­tion, just the R in the longer “L’Ar­gent, A to Z” video essay Quandt cre­at­ed for the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion’s release of the film.

The video essay­ist Kog­o­na­da, now a respect­ed film­mak­er in his own right, has so far put out two trib­utes to Bres­son: “Hands of Bres­son” just above, which con­cen­trates on the direc­tor’s use of those body parts, and “Once There Was Every­thing,” about the great cin­e­mat­ic effect to which he put doors all through­out his career. “Why should­n’t I put ten times more doors in my films if I feel like it?” the essay quotes him as say­ing. But then, the true fan knows that Bres­son could hard­ly have coun­te­nanced using even one more door than absolute­ly nec­es­sary — or one more of any­thing else, for that mat­ter.

In Bres­son’s world, to put it in dras­ti­cal­ly reduced terms, less is more: Julian Palmer’s short video essay above even takes that phrase as its title. Bres­son’s work has many virtues, few as name­able as their sim­plic­i­ty, but for the man him­self it always had to be just the right kind of sim­plic­i­ty. In Notes sur le ciné­matographe he iden­ti­fies two types: “The bad: sim­plic­i­ty as start­ing-point, sought too soon. The good: sim­plic­i­ty as end-prod­uct, rec­om­pense for years of effort.” Or, as he he writes else­where, “It is with some­thing clean and pre­cise that you will force the atten­tion of inat­ten­tive eyes and ears.” A cin­e­ma that has for­got­ten these lessons of Bres­son’s — now there’s a tru­ly fright­en­ing propo­si­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Doors Open onto Philo­soph­i­cal Mys­ter­ies in Robert Bresson’s Films: A Short Video Essay by Kog­o­na­da

Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals His Favorite Film­mak­ers: Bres­son, Anto­nioni, Felli­ni, and Oth­ers

The Eyes of Hitch­cock: A Mes­mer­iz­ing Video Essay on the Expres­sive Pow­er of Eyes in Hitchcock’s Films

An Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Luc Godard’s Inno­v­a­tive Film­mak­ing Through Five Video Essays

The Sur­re­al Film­mak­ing of David Lynch Explained in 9 Video Essays

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

“When it comes to ripe old fright­en­ers — or to any oth­er over­heat­ed genre — Scors­ese is the most ardent of pros­e­ly­tiz­ers,” writes the New York­er’s Antho­ny Lane in a review of that respect­ed direc­tor’s ripe-old-fright­en­er-fla­vored Shut­ter Island, “so much so that I would pre­fer to hear him enthuse about Ham­mer Hor­ror films, say, than to watch a Ham­mer Hor­ror film.” And though no Ham­mer pro­duc­tions appear on it, Scors­ese, who often seems as much film enthu­si­ast as film­mak­er, has put togeth­er a sol­id list of his per­son­al eleven scari­est hor­ror movies for The Dai­ly Beast. At its very top we have Robert Wise’s The Haunt­ing, whose trail­er you can watch above. Scors­ese promis­ing­ly describes the sto­ry of the film, orig­i­nal­ly bal­ly­hooed with the tagline “You may not believe in ghosts but you can­not deny ter­ror!,” as “about the inves­ti­ga­tion of a house plagued by vio­lent­ly assaultive spir­its.” His full and fright­en­ing list–perfect for Halloween–runs as fol­lows:

• The Haunt­ing (Robert Wise, 1963)
• Isle of the Dead (Val Lew­ton, 1945)
• The Unin­vit­ed (Lewis Allen, 1944)
• The Enti­ty (Frank de Felit­ta, 1983)
• Dead of Night (Alber­to Cav­al­can­ti, Charles Crich­ton, Basil Dear­den and Robert Hamer, 1945)
• The Changeling (Peter Medak, 1980)
• The Shin­ing (Stan­ley Kubrick, 1980)
• The Exor­cist (William Fried­kin, 1973)
• Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)
• The Inno­cents (Jack Clay­ton, 1961)
• Psy­cho (Alfred Hitch­cock, 1960)

You can watch clips of all these movies over at The Dai­ly Beast. (And if you sim­ply can’t get enough of the things, see also Time Out Lon­don’s list of the 100 best hor­ror films.) Such tastes make it no sur­prise to see a Hitch­cock film make Scors­ese’s list; so much does Scors­ese love Hitch­cock­’s work — “one of my guid­ing lights,” he calls the mak­er of Psy­cho — that he once spoofed his own fan­boy­ism in a com­mer­cial for Freix­enet sparkling wine. For those who’d pre­fer a more con­ven­tion­al Scors­ese-inspired binge watch, we’ve also fea­tured his list of twelve favorite films over­all and his list of 39 Essen­tial For­eign Films. What­ev­er genre you favor, you could do much worse than tak­ing his rec­om­men­da­tions.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Novem­ber, 2014.

via The Dai­ly Beast

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies (and Writes a New Essay on Film Preser­va­tion)

Mar­tin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imag­i­na­tive Short Works

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

Mar­tin Scors­ese Brings “Lost” Hitch­cock Film to Screen in Short Faux Doc­u­men­tary

Where Hor­ror Film Began: The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

In movies like Sev­en Samu­rai and High and Low, direc­tor Aki­ra Kuro­sawa took the cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage of Hol­ly­wood and improved on it, cre­at­ing a vig­or­ous, mus­cu­lar method of visu­al sto­ry­telling that became a styl­is­tic play­book for the likes of Mar­tin Scors­ese, George Lucas and Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la. In movies like Ikiru, The Bad Sleep Well and The Low­er Depths, Kuro­sawa relent­less­ly strug­gled to find the rays of light among the shad­ows of the human soul. This philo­soph­i­cal urgency com­bined with his visu­al bril­liance is what gives his work, espe­cial­ly his ear­ly films, such vital­i­ty.

“One thing that dis­tin­guish­es Aki­ra Kuro­sawa is that he didn’t just make a mas­ter­piece or two mas­ter­pieces,” Cop­po­la said dur­ing an inter­view. “He made eight mas­ter­pieces.”

So when Kuro­sawa comes out with a rec­om­mend­ed view­ing list, movie mavens every­where should take note. Such a list was pub­lished in his posthu­mous­ly pub­lished book Yume wa ten­sai de aru (A Dream is a Genius). His daugh­ter Kazuko Kuro­sawa described the list’s selec­tion process:

My father always said that the films he loved were too many to count, and to make a top ten rank. That explains why you can­not find in this list many of the titles of the films he regard­ed as won­der­ful. The prin­ci­ple of the choice is: one film for one direc­tor, entry of the unfor­get­table films about which I and my father had a love­ly talk, and of some ideas on cin­e­ma that he had cher­ished but did not express in pub­lic. This is the way I made a list of 100 films of Kurosawa’s choice.

Orga­nized chrono­log­i­cal­ly, the list starts with D.W. Griffith’s Bro­ken Blos­soms and ends with Takeshi Kitano’s Hana-Bi. In between is a remark­ably thor­ough and diverse col­lec­tion of films, mix­ing in equal parts Hol­ly­wood, art house and Japan­ese clas­sics. Many of the movies are exact­ly the ones you would see on any Film Stud­ies 101 syl­labus — Truffaut’s 400 Blows, Car­ol Reed’s The Third Man and DeSica’s Bicy­cle Thieves. Oth­er films are less expect­ed. Hayao Miyazaki’s utter­ly won­der­ful My Neigh­bor Totoro makes the cut, as does Ishi­ro Hon­da’s Goji­ra and Peter Weir’s Wit­ness. His pol­i­cy of one film per direc­tor yields some sur­pris­ing, almost will­ful­ly per­verse results. The God­fa­ther, Part 2 over The God­fa­ther? The King of Com­e­dy over Good­fel­las? Ivan the Ter­ri­ble over Bat­tle­ship Potemkin? The Birds over Ver­ti­go? Bar­ry Lyn­don over pret­ty much any­thing else that Stan­ley Kubrick did? And while I am pleased that Mikio Naruse gets a nod for Ukigu­mo – in a just world, Naruse would be as read­i­ly praised and cel­e­brat­ed as his con­tem­po­raries Yasu­jiro Ozu and Ken­ji Mizoguchi – I am also struck by the list’s most glar­ing, and curi­ous, omis­sion. There’s no Orson Welles.

You can see his 100 essen­tial movies below. Above we have the sec­ond film on the list, The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, which you can oth­er­wise find in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

1. Bro­ken Blos­soms or The Yel­low Man and the Girl (Grif­fith, 1919) USA
2. Das Cab­i­net des Dr. Cali­gari [The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari] (Wiene, 1920) Ger­many
3. Dr. Mabuse, der Spiel­er – Ein Bild der Zeit (Part 1 — Part 2) [Dr. Mabuse, the Gam­bler] (Lang, 1922) Ger­many
4. The Gold Rush (Chap­lin, 1925) USA
5. La Chute de la Mai­son Ush­er [The Fall of the House of Ush­er] (Jean Epstein, 1928) France
6. Un Chien Andalou [An Andalu­sian Dog] (Bunuel, 1928) France
7. Moroc­co (von Stern­berg, 1930) USA
8. Der Kongress Tanzt (Charell, 1931) Ger­many
9. Die 3groschenoper [The Three­pen­ny Opera] (Pab­st, 1931) Ger­many
10. Leise Fle­hen Meine Lieder [Lover Divine] (Forst, 1933) Austria/Germany
11. The Thin Man (Dyke, 1934) USA
12. Tonari no Yae-chan [My Lit­tle Neigh­bour, Yae] (Shi­mazu, 1934) Japan
13. Tange Sazen yowa: Hyaku­man ryo no tsubo [Sazen Tange and the Pot Worth a Mil­lion Ryo] (Yamana­ka, 1935) Japan
14. Akan­ishi Kaki­ta [Capri­cious Young Men] (Ita­mi, 1936) Japan
15. La Grande Illu­sion [The Grand Illu­sion] (Renoir, 1937) France
16. Stel­la Dal­las (Vidor, 1937) USA
17. Tsuzurika­ta Kyoshit­su [Lessons in Essay] (Yamamo­to, 1938) Japan
18. Tsuchi [Earth] (Uchi­da, 1939) Japan
19. Ninotch­ka (Lubitsch, 1939) USA
20. Ivan Groznyy I, Ivan Groznyy II: Boyarsky Zagov­or [Ivan the Ter­ri­ble Parts I and II] (Eisen­stein, 1944–46) Sovi­et Union
21. My Dar­ling Clemen­tine (Ford, 1946) USA
22. It’s a Won­der­ful Life (Capra, 1946) USA
23. The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946) USA
24. Ladri di Bici­clette [The Bicy­cle Thief] [Bicy­cle Thieves] (De Sica, 1948) Italy
25. Aoi san­myaku [The Green Moun­tains] (Imai, 1949) Japan
26. The Third Man (Reed, 1949) UK
27. Ban­shun [Late Spring] (Ozu, 1949) Japan
28. Orpheus (Cocteau, 1949) France
29. Karu­men kokyo ni kaeru [Car­men Comes Home] (Kinoshi­ta, 1951) Japan
30. A Street­car Named Desire (Kazan, 1951) USA
31. Thérèse Raquin [The Adul­tress] (Carne 1953) France
32. Saikaku ichidai onna [The Life of Oharu] (Mizoguchi, 1952) Japan
33. Viag­gio in Italia [Jour­ney to Italy] (Rosselli­ni, 1953) Italy
34. Goji­ra [Godzil­la] (Hon­da, 1954) Japan
35. La Stra­da (Felli­ni, 1954) Italy
36. Ukigu­mo [Float­ing Clouds] (Naruse, 1955) Japan
37. Pather Pan­chali [Song of the Road] (Ray, 1955) India
38. Dad­dy Long Legs (Neg­ule­sco, 1955) USA
39. The Proud Ones (Webb, 1956) USA
40. Baku­mat­su taiy­o­den [Sun in the Last Days of the Shogu­nate] (Kawashima, 1957) Japan
41. The Young Lions (Dmytryk, 1957) USA
42. Les Cousins [The Cousins] (Chabrol, 1959) France
43. Les Quarte Cents Coups [The 400 Blows] (Truf­faut, 1959) France
44. A bout de Souf­fle [Breath­less] (Godard, 1959) France
45. Ben-Hur (Wyler, 1959) USA
46. Oto­to [Her Broth­er] (Ichikawa, 1960) Japan
47. Une aus­si longue absence [The Long Absence] (Colpi, 1960) France/Italy
48. Le Voy­age en Bal­lon [Stow­away in the Sky] (Lam­or­isse, 1960) France
49. Plein Soleil [Pur­ple Noon] (Clement, 1960) France/Italy
50. Zazie dans le métro [Zazie on the Subway](Malle, 1960) France/Italy
51. L’Annee derniere a Marien­bad [Last Year in Marien­bad] (Resnais, 1960) France/Italy
52. What Ever Hap­pened to Baby Jane? (Aldrich, 1962) USA
53. Lawrence of Ara­bia (Lean, 1962) UK
54. Melodie en sous-sol [Any Num­ber Can Win] (Verneuil, 1963) France/Italy
55. The Birds (Hitch­cock, 1963) USA
56. Il Deser­to Rosso [The Red Desert](Antonioni, 1964) Italy/France
57. Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Woolf? (Nichols, 1966) USA
58. Bon­nie and Clyde (Penn, 1967) USA
59. In the Heat of the Night (Jew­i­son, 1967) USA
60. The Charge of the Light Brigade (Richard­son, 1968) UK
61. Mid­night Cow­boy (Schlesinger, 1969) USA
62. MASH (Alt­man, 1970) USA
63. John­ny Got His Gun (Trum­bo, 1971) USA
64. The French Con­nec­tion (Fried­kin, 1971) USA
65. El espíritu de la col­me­na [Spir­it of the Bee­hive] (Erice, 1973) Spain
66. Sol­yaris [Solaris] (Tarkovsky, 1972) Sovi­et Union
67. The Day of the Jack­al (Zin­ne­man, 1973) UK/France
68. Grup­po di famiglia in un inter­no [Con­ver­sa­tion Piece] (Vis­con­ti, 1974) Italy/France
69. The God­fa­ther Part II (Cop­po­la, 1974) USA
70. San­dakan hachiban­shokan bohkyo [San­dakan 8] (Kumai, 1974) Japan
71. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (For­man, 1975) USA
72. O, Thi­as­sos [The Trav­el­ling Play­ers] (Angelopou­los, 1975) Greece
73. Bar­ry Lyn­don (Kubrick, 1975) UK
74. Daichi no komo­ri­u­ta [Lul­la­by of the Earth] (Masumu­ra, 1976) Japan
75. Annie Hall (Allen, 1977) USA
76. Neokonchen­naya pye­sa dlya mekhanich­esko­go piani­no [Unfin­ished Piece for Mechan­i­cal Piano] (Mikhalkov, 1977) Sovi­et Union
77. Padre Padrone [My Father My Mas­ter] (P. & V. Taviani, 1977) Italy
78. Glo­ria (Cas­savetes, 1980) USA
79. Haruka­naru yama no yobi­goe [A Dis­tant Cry From Spring] (Yama­da, 1980) Japan
80. La Travi­a­ta (Zef­firelli, 1982) Italy
81. Fan­ny och Alexan­der [Fan­ny and Alexan­der] (Bergman, 1982) Sweden/France/West Ger­many
82. Fitz­car­ral­do (Her­zog, 1982) Peru/West Ger­many
83. The King of Com­e­dy (Scors­ese, 1983) USA
84. Mer­ry Christ­mas Mr. Lawrence (Oshi­ma, 1983) UK/Japan/New Zealand
85. The Killing Fields (Joffe 1984) UK
86. Stranger Than Par­adise (Jar­musch, 1984) USA/ West Ger­many
87. Dong­dong de Jiaqi [A Sum­mer at Grand­pa’s] (Hou, 1984) Tai­wan
88. Paris, Texas (Wen­ders, 1984) France/ West Ger­many
89. Wit­ness (Weir, 1985) USA
90. The Trip to Boun­ti­ful (Mas­ter­son, 1985) USA
91. Otac na sluzbenom putu [When Father was Away on Busi­ness] (Kus­turi­ca, 1985) Yugoslavia
92. The Dead (Hus­ton, 1987) UK/Ireland/USA
93. Khane-ye doust kod­jast? [Where is the Friend’s Home] (Kiarosta­mi, 1987) Iran
94. Bagh­dad Cafe [Out of Rosen­heim] (Adlon, 1987) West Germany/USA
95. The Whales of August (Ander­son, 1987) USA
96. Run­ning on Emp­ty (Lumet, 1988) USA
97. Tonari no totoro [My Neigh­bour Totoro] (Miyaza­ki, 1988) Japan
98. A un [Bud­dies] (Furuha­ta, 1989) Japan
99. La Belle Noiseuse [The Beau­ti­ful Trou­ble­mak­er] (Riv­ette, 1991) France/Switzerland
100. Hana-bi [Fire­works] (Kitano, 1997) Japan

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Jan­u­ary, 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la Star in Japan­ese Whisky Com­mer­cials (1980)

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Advice to Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers: Write, Write, Write and Read

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa to Ing­mar Bergman: “A Human Is Not Real­ly Capa­ble of Cre­at­ing Real­ly Good Works Until He Reach­es 80”

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

The Big Lebows­ki came out 20 years ago. State­ments of that kind are often pre­ced­ed by the ques­tion of whether you want to feel old, but this one would­n’t have quite the same effect: on some lev­el, The Big Lebows­ki feels as old as, or maybe even old­er than, cin­e­ma itself. In their half-hour con­ver­sa­tion look­ing back at the film and its lega­cy, NBC’s Har­ry Smith asks actors John Good­man, Steve Busce­mi, and Jeff Bridges, bet­ter known to the movie’s legions of fans as Wal­ter Sobchak, Don­ny Ker­abat­sos, and of course Jeff Lebows­ki — also known as His Dude­ness, Dud­er, El Dud­eri­no if you’re not into the whole brevi­ty thing, but above all as the Dude — whether it felt like 20 years have passed. More than one of them come right back with just the right response: “It does and does­n’t.”

The con­ver­sa­tion touch­es on such sub­jects as what they first thought of the script (“Right on the page, it felt like it was impro­vi­sa­tion,” says Bridges), the spir­i­tu­al impli­ca­tions of the sto­ry and char­ac­ters (Bridges tells of the encounter with a Bud­dhist teacher that led to the book The Dude and the Zen Mas­ter in 2013), how many “F‑bombs” the final prod­uct end­ed up con­tain­ing (275), and what usu­al­ly hap­pens in the still extreme­ly com­mon event of an encounter with a Lebows­ki fan on the street.

All three actors evince great plea­sure at the oppor­tu­ni­ty to remem­ber work­ing with Joel and Ethan Coen on what would become the direct­ing broth­ers’ most beloved film, one that has inspired its own fes­ti­val, its own reli­gion, and much more besides. But as many of the movie’s cur­rent enthu­si­asts (per­haps due to their youth, per­haps due to their indul­gence in mem­o­ry-cloud­ing sub­stances) won’t remem­ber, The Big Lebows­ki did­n’t become a phe­nom­e­non right away.

“So you make a movie like this, you love the script, you love work­ing togeth­er,” as Smith puts it, “and then nobody goes to see it.” Indeed, the moviego­ing pub­lic of 1998 did­n’t quite know what to make of the fact that, as a fol­low-up to the Acad­e­my Award-win­ning Far­go, the Coen broth­ers served up what Good­man describes as “Philip Mar­lowe meets The Trip.” As Busce­mi remem­bers, “it took like five or six years before peo­ple start­ed com­ing up to me and say­ing that they loved it.” Then came the col­lege kids, who would tell him not just that they loved it, but that they’d seen it eight, nine, ten times. The first time peo­ple saw The Big Lebows­ki they came out in bewil­der­ment ask­ing what it means, but “what the movie does so bril­liant­ly is, once you know what it is, then you real­ly enjoy, like, every moment of it.”

Among the few view­ers attuned enough to its fre­quen­cy to enjoy it right away was Roger Ebert: “Some may com­plain The Big Lebows­ki rush­es in all direc­tions and nev­er ends up any­where,” he wrote in his ini­tial review. “That isn’t the film’s flaw, but its style.” But even his appre­ci­a­tion grew over time, and in 2010 he anoint­ed it one of his offi­cial Great Movies, describ­ing it as involv­ing “kid­nap­ping, ran­som mon­ey, a porno king, a reclu­sive mil­lion­aire, a run­away girl, the Mal­ibu police, a woman who paints while nude and strapped to an over­head har­ness, and the last act of the dis­agree­ment between Viet­nam vet­er­ans and Flower Pow­er,” all held togeth­er by “a plot and dia­logue that per­haps only the Coen broth­ers could have devised.” Hence Bridges’ wor­ries about get­ting the music of the script down cold before shoot­ing: “Did I get the ‘man’ in the right place? Did I add anoth­er F‑bomb?”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Is The Big Lebows­ki a Great Noir Film? A New Way to Look at the Coen Broth­ers’ Icon­ic Movie

What Makes a Coen Broth­ers Movie a Coen Broth­ers Movie? Find Out in a 4‑Hour Video Essay of Bar­ton Fink, The Big Lebows­ki, Far­go, No Coun­try for Old Men & More

The Big Lebows­ki Reimag­ined as a Clas­sic 8‑Bit Video Game

Tui­leries: The Coen Broth­ers’ Short Film About Steve Buscemi’s Very Bad Day in the Paris Metro

The City in Cin­e­ma Mini-Doc­u­men­taries Reveal the Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner, Her, Dri­ve, Repo Man, and More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.