All 18 International Movies Ever Nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, Ranked

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Published Mar 15, 2026, 4:56 PM EDT

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Throughout the history of the Academy Awards, there really haven’t been that many genuine foreign films nominated for the top prize: Best Picture. The term “foreign film” will be used interchangeably with “international film” below, and here, it’s referring to anything that was made outside an English-speaking country and in a language other than English.

Well, if a film was co-produced with a country where the primary language is English, or if it featured some dialogue in English, it’s still going to be counted below. The films that almost qualify, but not quite, include Letters from Iwo Jima (a U.S. production with mostly Japanese dialogue), Babel (co-produced by the U.S. and with a solid amount of English dialogue), Minari (a U.S. production with a split between Korean and English dialogue), and Past Lives (a U.S. co-production with South Korea with a split between Korean and English dialogue). With those out of the way, these are all the undeniable international movies that have been nominated for Best Picture, ranked pretty haphazardly in terms of quality. Apologies in advance for a couple of the movies that don’t rank very highly.

18 'Cries and Whispers' (1972)

For whatever reason, Cries and Whispers is the only Ingmar Bergman film that ever earned a Best Picture nomination, and it’s like… okay. It almost feels like an unintentional parody of arthouse cinema, because Bergman just lays it all on way too thick. His films tended to be heavy and thought-provoking, at least the good ones, though Cries and Whispers is too much in how it looks, feels, and sounds.

It’s the bad kind of arthouse; the sort that could well put someone off these sorts of films for good if they were unlucky enough to see it before much else. If you're new to Bergman, don’t start here. If you're caught up on his heavy-hitters, don’t progress here, either. Just avoid Cries and Whispers. It’s kind of bad. Few subsequent takes will be quite this hot, but it’s just a shame that this one was nominated for Best Picture, rather than something like Fanny and Alexander, Persona, or The Seventh Seal.

17 'All Quiet on the Western Front' (2022)

If All Quiet on the Western Front had a less aggressive score, it would be much better. The music is so booming that it makes a good many scenes feel melodramatic and even forced. Not to the extent of unintentional comedy, since this is too harrowing a World War I movie for even a very clunky score to shift the mood entirely, but the music is just not nearly as well-executed as the sound design or the visuals here.

Otherwise, this is a competent update of All Quiet on the Western Front, with the 1930 movie of the same name being the first adaptation of the novel (also of the same name), and worth mentioning here because it was one of the earliest Best Picture winners, too. 2022’s All Quiet on the Western Front is technically more effective, visceral, and nightmarish by modern-day standards, but if you take history into account, the 1930 adaptation is probably more impressive, just in terms of how intense it was for a film that’s now nearing 100 years of age.

16 'Emilia Pérez' (2024)

Zoe Saldana as Rita Mora Castro walking outside in Emilia Perez.

If you don’t want to read a lukewarm defense of parts of Emilia Pérez, just keep scrolling. There are valid criticisms to be made here, but also, it felt like a bit of a punching bag, or an Oscars villain, for the year it came out. Some (not all!) of the criticisms felt like people jumping on a bandwagon. Some of the excesses and potentially questionable decisions felt like they were intentional, and it was a musical going for a heightened/borderline-soap opera sort of thing, a lot of the time.

The transgender representation, or lack thereof, was controversial. You could argue it’s good to have characters of different identities being able to be good characters, bad characters, or somewhere in between, or you could feel that’s true but not get the sense that Emilia Pérez did a good job doing that. And then there were controversies outside the film, regarding comments made by people involved in its production, and that stuff does make it harder to speak up for Emilia Pérez, and the stuff it does right. It’s not thaaaat bad. It's also not amazing or a slam-dunk, by any means. Some of it was odd and alienating, but there was a vision here that was sort of realized, and the lack of nuance when it came to some critiques of the film made the 2025 Oscar race really exhausting to keep up with, after a while.

15 'Life Is Beautiful' (1997)

Guido, Dora, and Giosué riding a bike down a street in 'Life is Beautiful'

While Life Is Beautiful is unique and also quite moving in the moment, it starts to fall apart a little the more you think about it, which is a shame. It’s a romantic dramedy that starts with a first half considerably lighter than its second half, because the earliest section of the movie is set during the first year of World War II, in Italy, and the war stuff is a bit more in the background. And then it’s foregrounded, in the second half.

Look, there’s no gentle way to put it. Life Is Beautiful becomes a drama about the Holocaust in its second half, though it still feels like something of a comedy, because the main character uses humor to shield his young son from the horrors of living in a concentration camp. The second half is more about humor as a coping mechanism than it is a full-on comedy, sure, but the tone still feels just a bit off, even when considering what the story is about. It’s an odd mix of moving and borderline iffy in terms of taste, at least in parts.

14 'Amour' (2012)

Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintingnant in Amour

Amour was good for sure, as an exploration of aging and grappling with the psychological toll of losing one’s memory and parts of their mind because of health complications, but Vortex was better. Few people have heard of Vortex, and fewer still talk about it, but it’s a bit more interesting as far as the filmmaking is concerned, and you do feel what the elderly are going through to a more visceral extent.

Maybe that’s not the point of Amour, exactly, since this is a Michael Haneke film, and he almost always approaches things in a distant and/or detached kind of way. That approach here doesn’t work quite as well as it does for his very best films, though it doesn’t not work… it’s a confounding movie at times, but it’s probably supposed to be. And the detached style does ultimately lead to much of the film feeling stark and brutally realistic, so even if you're not riveted while it’s playing out, parts of it are likely to linger in your mind for a while, after it’s over.

13 'The Secret Agent' (2025)

Wagner Moura looking intently in The Secret Agent

The Oscars, in 2009, started nominating more than just five movies per year in the Best Picture category, which has had the effect of leading to more blockbusters getting nominated, and also more foreign films. More accurately, the Oscars returned to nominating more than five movies in the night’s biggest category, since much of the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s saw more than five titles get nominated for Best Picture.

So, the 2025 Academy Awards has two foreign movies nominated for Best Picture, and The Secret Agent is the first worth noting here. It’s a sprawling movie about a persecuted man trying to lie low at a tumultuous time in Brazilian history… or that’s the basics, at least. There’s a lot more to The Secret Agent, and even if it might be oddly paced at times, or even close to too ambitious, there still remains an undeniably large number of things to appreciate within it.

12 'Il Postino: The Postman' (1994)

Massimo Troisi as a policeman in 'Il Postino'

With Il Postino: The Postman and the Academy Awards, things are a bit complicated, because it was nominated for Best Picture without a nomination for Best Foreign Film, even though that was an award that’s been given officially/annually since the mid-1950s. It was directed by an English filmmaker (Michael Radford), so maybe that’s why, but it’s otherwise an Italian-language film, and primarily an Italian production (with Belgium and France co-producing).

Anyway, it was a Best Picture nominee, and it’s hard to call it an American or English film by the previously established rules, back in the introduction, even with Radford being the filmmaker, so here it is. And it’s quite good, functioning as a gentle and sometimes moving romantic dramedy that proved surprisingly successful in the U.S., for a non-English-language film, indeed being the highest-grossing for a time (the previously-mentioned Life Is Beautiful ultimately ended up earning more, as did at least a couple other movies that'll be mentioned shortly).

11 'Sentimental Value' (2025)

Renate Reinsve as Nora Berg holding Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as Agnes in Sentimental Value.

Joachim Trier’s previous film to Sentimental Value, The Worst Person in the World, received a bit of attention from the Academy Awards, earning nominations for Best International Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay, but the response to his 2025 film was something else entirely. It got eight nominations, including four acting ones and, on top of Best International Feature Film, Best Picture, too.

It can’t be seen as an undeniable shoo-in for Best International Feature Film, since The Secret Agent is also in both categories, but both are worthy and among 2025’s most acclaimed films. With Sentimental Value, it’s kind of a family drama and a movie about filmmaking/creativity at the same time, dealing with difficult emotions in a patient and mostly compelling way, bolstered (obviously) by quite a bit of great acting, too.

10 'Z' (1969)

Jean-Louis Trintignant sitting at a desk in Z (1969)

If you don’t mind feeling a bit paranoid and on edge for a good many hours, Z could well make for an appropriate double feature with the aforementioned The Secret Agent. It’s also a political thriller, with the plot here concerning a real-life historical event, but Z does take some liberties with history, and a good many characters are unnamed, yet based on – or inspired by – real-life people.

Z is also incredibly dense, so you could say that it’s technically about the assassination of a Greek politician based on the real-life Grigoris Lambrakis, who was assassinated, but that’s also only scratching the surface. It’s admirable how dizzying this one is, even all these decades later and in a world where there have been so many uneasy and intentionally intense movies inspired by actual events that shook the world, be they assassinations or otherwise.

9 'I'm Still Here' (2024)

I’m Still Here was very successful in Brazil, and then that success carried over into other markets when it started getting a wider release, with the momentum building, ultimately, to some major success at the Academy Awards. It won Best International Feature, over Emilia Pérez (which had a good many more nominations overall, so that might've seemed like an upset if you weren’t aware of all the Emilia Pérez controversy), and was also nominated for Best Actress (Fernanda Torres) and, of course, Best Picture.

Narratively, I’m Still Here is a patiently paced drama about what happens to a family when the father goes missing, and is presumed to be abducted (or worse) because of his political beliefs. It was quite successful for a biographical drama, and also stands as the first Brazilian movie to win an Academy Award (unless you count co-productions, like 1985’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, a mostly English language film produced by Brazil and the U.S., which saw William Hurt win a Best Actor Oscar).

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