Beyond Hollywood: The Best World Cinema You Can Stream Right Now
From Kurosawa's Seven Samurai to Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, the highest-rated international films on Celluloid prove the best cinema has never been confined to Hollywood.
Some of the highest Celluloid Scores in our entire catalog belong to films made far from Hollywood. If you only watch English-language movies, you’re skipping much of the best cinema ever made — and our international rankings make an unignorable case for casting a wider net.
What is the best foreign film of all time?
By Celluloid Score, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (94%) tops our world-cinema ranking — the 1954 Japanese epic that wrote the template every ensemble action film has followed since. Close behind sits Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story (93%), one of the most quietly devastating family dramas in the medium.
The international films critics rate highest
- 94% — Seven Samurai (Japan): the blueprint for the modern action ensemble.
- 93% — Tokyo Story (Japan): Ozu’s masterpiece of generational drift.
- 92% — Parasite (South Korea): Bong Joon-ho’s genre-bending, Oscar-winning class satire.
- 92% — Rashomon (Japan): the film that taught cinema how to doubt its own narrator.
- 92% — Spirited Away (Japan): Studio Ghibli’s crowning achievement.
- 91% — 8½ (Italy): Fellini’s dazzling film about not being able to make a film.
Where should a newcomer to world cinema start?
Start with Parasite. It’s the rare masterpiece that’s also a page-turner — a thriller you can recommend to anyone, in any language, that happens to be one of the most acclaimed films of its decade. From there, our Browse by Country and Browse by Language hubs make it easy to go deeper into Korean, Japanese, Indian, French, and more.
For the newest international standouts of this year, don’t miss Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Brazilian thriller The Secret Agent.