The Best Peruvian Movies | A Top 10
When people talk about Latin American cinema, they usually limit that to Argentinian movies, Mexican movies, or Brazilian movies. It’s because these countries are popular
As a cinephile, I love watching movies, especially foreign language movies. Because this is what CulturalReads and I are all about.
And I love watching movies from foreign directors because they bring unique stories about diverse cultures and history. This is something you can’t experience from mainstream Hollywood.
Naturally, I admire many global movie directors whose work I keenly look forward to. And there’s this certain feeling of familiarity and contentment of watching movies of favourite international filmmakers.
It’s like deep down I already know I will like their movies. Since most of these are foreign movie directors, you should expect an exciting foreign language movies list.
And by the end, let’s see how many global movie directors you know about and if you have seen their works. Let’s start!
Kleber Mendonça Filho was a film critic before he became a movie director in the late 1990s. Initially, he directed short movies like Enjaulado, Vinil Verde and Cold Tropics as part of Brazil’s independent film scene.
His full feature film, Neighboring Sounds, came in 2012, making him one of the best contemporary international filmmakers from Brazil.
His work focuses on social drama using psychological thriller, and occasionally horror, but always in realism. You will find his movies mostly revolve around urban life, class tension and power dynamics.
Aquarius, a Palme d’Or nominee, and Bacurau are some of his best Brazilian movies. Most recently, he directed The Secret Agent, which won the Best Non-English Language Film at the 83rd Golden Globes, a first for a Brazilian film.
You should also watch one of his older movies, Neighboring Sounds, a hidden gem about the class anxieties in a bustling neighbourhood.
Internationally, he has won the Cannes Film Festival for Best Director and a Cannes Jury Prize for Bacurau.
Want to know more about Brazil as a country? Here are some of our favourite Brazilian books and Brazilian music.
Paolo Sorrentino began directing in the late 1990s, but his first feature, One Man Up, came in 2001. Since he is from Naples and it reflects in his work through a concurrent theme of beauty and decay.
I find it difficult to define his work in a single genre, but you could say, it is an arthouse cinema with political satire and existential drama. The Great Beauty and The Hand of God show this very fascination with beauty, decadence and memory.
You will find his character’s dealing with aging, disillusionment, power, religion, and identity in an elite or morally compromising world.
But it is his collaboration with Toni Servillo, Europe’s finest actor, which makes his Italian movies truly enticing. He has worked with Servillo for movies like The Great Beauty, Il Divo, and Loro.
Apart from these great movies, you should also check his lesser famous but worth-watching movies like This Must Be the Place and The Family Friend.
Sorrentino has received major international awards, including the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for The Great Beauty. He has also won multiple awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival.
Also, do check out my favourite Italian books.
Bong Joon-ho’s name needs no introduction and it’s also because of his work in Hollywood. But that’s not where his story began. It began in South Korea where he began in the late 1990s with short films, before releasing his first feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite, in 2000.
However, it was Memories of Murder which was a massive critical and commercial success. In hindsight, it also meant that one of the best global movie directors is here.
He followed that with a monster film, The Host, and later, Mother. Both of these movies rank among the highest-grossing South Korean movies.
Bong Joon-ho mixes genres from dark comedy, crime, thriller and even horror. All of these genres focus on class and social inequality. Movies like Mother, Snowpiercer, Okja and Parasite are prime examples of that.
And Parasite is one of his masterpieces and the first non-English language movie to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, with Bong also winning Best Director.
Mickey 17 is his recent English-language movie with the same signature dark humor in a visually inventive sci-fi world. And there’s a long list of prestigious movies awards, making him one of the great foreign movie directors.
You should also check out modern Korean books from Bong Joon-ho’s native country.
For Park Chan-wook, the passion started in university, where he ran a film club and wrote critical essays on cinema. But it took time for his passion to receive success since his earliest films like The Moon Is the Sun’s Dream and Trio.
However his film, Joint Security Area about soldiers on the North-South Korean border broke box office records in South Korea.
He blends crime, mystery, thriller with brutal subject matter. There’s always revenge and obsession, and a fine line between victim and perpetrators.
His Vengeance Trilogy, which include movies, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance are the clearest examples of this.
At the same time, his most notable work The Handmaiden is not a brutal revenge but mixes eroticism and deception with historical drama.
His most recent foreign language movies like Decision to Leave and No Other Choices are equally great, making him one of the great foreign movie directors.
Yorgos Lanthimos was part of Greece’s experimental film scene in the 2000s, before making his first feature movie, Kinetta. The real breakthrough was Dogtooth, a psychological drama about three young adult siblings kept prisoner by their manipulative father.
Lanthimos is part of the Greek Weird Wave and it shows in his movies as an absurdist drama, disturbing scenarios, dark comedy and psychological satire.
His movies like The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Poor Things have repeating themes of control, desire, power structures, and the fragility of social norms.
Although Hollywood productions like The Favourite and Poor Things have brought him mainstream recognition. But his weirdly enough coming of age movies Dogtooth and The Lobster are his classic Greece works.
Lanthimos has won the Jury Prize for The Lobster and multiple Academy Award nominations. Meanwhile, Poor Things won multiple Oscars, making him one of the great global movie directors.
Meanwhile you should also read some Greek classics since we have already been talking about absurdism.
Asghar Farhadi is one of the greatest global movie directors of our times working in a realist cinema. With a degree in theatre direction, he used to write and direct for Iranian television and theater before feature films.
Before international recognition, he already directed promising foreign language movies like Dancing in the Dust and The Beautiful City. However, his movie Fireworks Wednesday was a sign that he’s going to be one of the best international filmmakers.
And it didn’t take long to announce as he won Silver Bear for Best Director for his movie, About Elly.
Two years later, he directed a pioneering work, A Separation, making him a global cinematic figure. It made Farhadi the first Iranian filmmaker to win an Oscar in the category of Best Foreign Language Film.
His next movie, The Salesman, won the second Oscar for Iran. Since then, he has released two more best Iranian movies; The Past, A Hero.
Although many people associate Asghar Farhadi with arthouse films, it is otherwise. His movies have drama and psychological realism and you could even say social thrillers. Class division and gender expectations take ordinary characters to extremes.
Tran Anh Hung is one of the most visually poetic international filmmakers from Vietnamese cinema. He was born in Vietnam but left for France after the fall of Saigon in 1975.
After reading cinematography, he made a debut with one of the best Vietnamese films, The Scent of Green Papaya.
His work is quite different as it doesn’t revolve around conventional plot-driven narratives. It rather has atmospheric dramas that rely on memory, food, sensuality, and human connection.
In terms of his best works, The Scent of Green Papaya remains the defining entry point, while Cyclo is a darker and chaotic portrait of urban Vietnam. Vertical Ray of the Sun is another visually rich film.
The Taste of Things is one of his recent foreign language movies, which is a 19th-century French love story through the language of cooking starring Juliette Binoche. If you particularly like such movies, you will enjoy these best movies about food.
To explore more about Vietnam, check out Vietnamese music and Vietnamese books.
Ciro Guerra is one of the contemporary global movie directors of modern Latin American movies. He began directing features in the early 2000s, first gaining attention with Wandering Shadows.
But Wandering Shadows was a typical Colombian cinema’s portrayal of crime and narcotics and he had to move beyond that.
So, he took to adventure, historical cinema, and magical realism, within remote parts like the Amazon rainforest. He deals with subjects like colonialism, cultural erasure, spirituality, and humanity’s relationship with nature.
Embrace of the Serpent is one of his finest Colombian movies. It is a black-and-white film about real explorers traveling through the Amazon. Birds of Passage is about the origins of Colombia’s drug trade.
And if you like road movies, you can watch The Wind Journeys that celebrates Colombia’s musical and regional diversity.
For his work about history on indigenous cultures, he remains one of the great foreign movie directors.
If you want to explore more about Colombia, here’s some Colombian music you can enjoy.
Thomas Vinterberg is one of the finest global movie directors from Denmark. He is one of the defining figures of the Dogme 95 movement. Being a son of a film critic, he took great interest in movies.
After his film graduation, he released films like The Boy Who Walked Backwards and The Biggest Heroes.
But it was The Celebration (Festen) with an emotional intensity and realism of the Dogme 95 movement, which brought international recognition.
Vinterberg’s characters are family people who are constantly under social pressure and emotional repression. And these people are always in morally or psychologically difficult situations.
The Hunt, Another Round and Submarino are some of his great Scandinavian movies. Another Round won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, making it one of the best movies from foreign directors.
Hirokazu Kore-eda is one of the great global movie directors of contemporary Japanese cinema. Initially, he was a television documentary maker before fiction filmmaking. His first film, Maborosi, made him an important voice in world cinema.
In his movies, family dramas take dramatic turns between biological family and emotional family. Instead of melodrama, we see small gestures, silence and mundane routine driving the narrative.
Still Walking, Like Father, Like Son, and Shoplifters are some of his best Japanese movies that capture the memory, loss, abandonment, parenthood, and social invisibility in normal life.
After Life is his lesser known movie which is a philosophical film, where the dead must choose a single memory to carry into eternity.
Internationally, Kore-eda won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Shoplifters. In Japan, he is compared to classic filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu, making him one of the great international filmmakers.
Japan also has a great literary scene when it comes to books. You can read more about them in Japanese books and cat fiction books.
I can talk about many other foreign language movie directors but I will have to contain myself. So,instead of talking about it in detail, I will share a table of these directors and their works in world cinema.
|
Director |
Country |
Movies to Watch |
|
Joachim Trier |
Sentimental Value, The Worst Person in the World, Oslo, August 31st |
|
|
Alfonso Cuarón |
Roma, Y Tu Mamá También, Children of Men |
|
|
Nuri Bilge Ceylan |
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Winter Sleep, About Dry Grasses |
|
|
Marwan Hamed |
Egypt |
The Blue Elephant, El Sett, The Yacoubian Building |
|
Juan José Campanella |
The Secret in Their Eyes, The Same Love the Same Rain, Son of the Bride |
In world cinema, I find it quite amusing that stories change depending on where you stand in the world. Different countries carry different histories, humor, silences and other complexities. And great global movie directors understand how to turn those cultural details into something universal.
What I also admire about these international filmmakers is that they take creative risks. They create foreign language movies that feel personal, reflective, or quietly devastating. And perhaps that is why foreign language cinema stays with us longer.
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Global movie directors often bring unique storytelling styles, cultural depth, and artistic experimentation that differ from mainstream commercial cinema.
Directors like Bong Joon-ho, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Paolo Sorrentino are great starting points because their films balance accessibility with strong artistic identity.
Movies from foreign directors focus more on atmosphere, realism, social themes, and culturally specific storytelling rather than formula-driven spectacle.
Foreign language movie directors have expanded global cinema by introducing diverse perspectives, innovative narratives, and internationally acclaimed films.
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When people talk about Latin American cinema, they usually limit that to Argentinian movies, Mexican movies, or Brazilian movies. It’s because these countries are popular
Food has a great way to connect, inspire and drive human emotions. It also carries memory, identity, conflict, ambition, and survival. A person visiting distant
There’s a distinct mood that we experience while watching Scandinavian movies. Some unique elements involve snow-covered streets, grey skies, and characters carrying heavy emotional weight.
