50 Best Foreign Movies on Amazon Prime Right Now

50 Best Foreign Movies on Amazon Prime Right Now

February 7, 2025

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The pandemic has taken away our ability to physically travel internationally and interact with other cultures, but movies offer an incredible escape to anyone willing to turn on the subtitles.

Below are the best foreign-language movies on Amazon Prime right now.

41. Insomnia (1997)

7.4

Genres

Crime, Mystery, Thriller

Director

Erik Skjoldbjærg

Actors

Bjørn Floberg, Bjørn Moan, Frode Rasmussen, Gisken Armand

Moods

Challenging, Character-driven, Discussion-sparking

In a few seconds, a mistake can change your life forever. Insomnia is centered on a Swedish detective trying to solve a murder while trying desperately to cover a mistake made from the difficult mix of the fog and human exhaustion, but in doing so, his guilt, shame, and suspicion that no one would believe him due to past mistakes, weigh down on him, twisting the police procedural upon itself. Stellan Skarsgård holds an incredibly restrained performance throughout the entire film, and it’s well-framed by writer-director Erik Skjoldbjærg, whose use of cold white light in this debut feature eventually became the staple of on-screen Scandinavian noir.

42. Monsieur Lazhar (2012)

7.4

Genres

Comedy, Drama

Director

Philippe Falardeau

Actors

André Robitaille, Brigitte Poupart, Daniel Gadouas, Danielle Proulx

Moods

Depressing, Dramatic

After the sudden death of a teacher, 55-year-old Algerian immigrant Bachir Lazhar is hired at an elementary school in Montreal. Struggling with a cultural gap between himself and his students at first, he helps them to deal with the situation, revealing his own tragic past. A strong portrait without any weird sentimentality. 11-year-old actress Sophie Nélisse makes her brilliant debut.

43. Gomorra (2008)

7.3

Genres

Crime, Drama

Director

Matteo Garrone, Maurizio Braucci

Actors

Alfonso Santagata, Carmine Paternoster, Ciro Petrone, Fortunato Cerlino

Moods

Dramatic, Raw, Suspenseful

In the crowded genre of Mafia movies, Gomorrah finds its originality in not romanticizing anything. It’s authentically gripping, violent without being excessively violent, and something that can only be described as a masterpiece of Italian cinema.  It follows different protagonists’ entry into organised crime in Naples, with the two main ones taking their inspiration from American gangster characters.  Just to give you a sense of how well-rooted this movie is, after it was done shooting, many of the characters (including the guy who plays the clan boss in the movie), were arrested. In his case, he was caught trying to collect  “pizzo”, otherwise known as mafia tax.

44. Electric Shadows (2005)

7.3

Genres

Drama, Family

Director

Female director, Jiang Xiao

Actors

Guan Xiaotong, Jiang Hongbo, Jiang Shan, Li Haibin

Moods

Dramatic, Emotional, Heart-warming

Electric Shadows is often deemed something like a Chinese Cinema Paradiso. It has the friendship with an older film projectionist, the small town gathering around outdoor screenings of foreign film, a childhood friendship between a boy and girl that meet again unexpectedly, and of course, it wears its heart for the movies right on its sleeve. It doesn’t quite compare to the Italian classic, and there are some moments when the film slightly drags, but Electric Shadows does capture the feeling of awe that you get when you watch your first movie, whether that be when you’re a kid taking your first steps in the world, or when you’re an adult hoping for something more despite the life allowed to you.

45. Night on the Galactic Railroad (1985)

7.3

Genres

Adventure, Animation, Drama

Director

Gisaburō Sugii

Actors

Chika Sakamoto, Chikao Ohtsuka, Fujio Tokita, Gorō Naya

Moods

Challenging, Emotional, Lovely

When a film adaptation takes the story of a beloved Japanese children’s novel, and depicts the characters travelling to heaven as cats, it kinda seems like a random addition. Yet, this decision makes sense for Night on the Galactic Railroad, because while the magic and the dreaminess of the trip to the stars still remains intact, the cats keep a bit of the mystery in a visual manner and keep the touch of whimsy as the train ride leads into darker and heavier turns. The visual poetry and the thoughtful way the film contemplates the novel Kenji Miyazawa wrote in grief makes Night on the Galactic Railroad one to remember.

46. He Loves Me… He Loves Me Not (2002)

7.3

Genres

Drama, Romance, Thriller

Director

Female director, Laetitia Colombani

Actors

Audrey Tautou, Clément Sibony, Élodie Navarre, Eric Savin

Moods

Character-driven, Dark, Dramatic

With plenty of old men having extramarital affairs, taking advantage of younger women and leaving them forlorn in love, it can feel deceptively easy to take sides in the first forty minutes of He Loves Me… He Loves Me Not. Who wouldn’t side with Angélique, especially with the innocent, childlike face of Audrey Tautou? And yet, when the twist occurs, the film fills the gaps in totally unexpected ways, gradually escalating to a terrible and sad conclusion about this seemingly romantic girl. It’s hard to further talk about He Loves Me… He Loves Me Not without getting into spoiler territory, so if this is the first time you’ve heard of the movie, go and watch it without any context.

47. Heidi (2015)

7.2

Genres

Adventure, Drama, Family

Director

Alain Gsponer

Actors

Anna Schinz, Anuk Steffen, Beth Armstrong, Bruno Ganz

Moods

Easy, Feel-Good, Heart-warming

Where The Secret Garden championed the restorative powers of tending to a garden as well as one’s thoughts, Swiss novel Heidi touched on similar themes a few decades before, celebrating instead the natural beauty of the Alps mountainside, and the titular character bringing back joy and hope to her family. The film remains faithful to the novel, playing out the book’s events with a more sleek look and even more stunning landscapes of the Swiss Alps. While previous generations would inevitably compare the version of their time to this latest version, 2015’s Heidi is a decent adaptation, recreating the classic tale for today’s kids.

48. Pusher (1996)

7.2

Genres

Action, Crime, Drama

Director

Nicolas Winding Refn

Actors

Gordon Kennedy, Gyda Hansen, Jesper Lohmann, Karsten Schrøder

Moods

Challenging, Character-driven, Dark

Films about drug dealing aren’t particularly new, but the way Pusher delves into their lives feels different– more realistic than glamorous, somewhat like a guerrilla documentary, with the handheld camera as a silent, unnamed witness. As the camera follows low-level dealer Frank through the course of a week, Kim Bodnia skillfully garners empathy with the way he holds himself through the pressure, and does the opposite when he does the same wrongs that were done to him. The story itself may be simple, but writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn made his mark through this debut, inadvertently creating a franchise and influencing Danish cinema.

49. The Tiger (2015)

7.2

Genres

Action, Adventure, Drama

Director

Park Hoon-jung

Actors

Ahn Sang-woo, Choi Min-sik, Han Dong-wook, Jeong Man-sik

Moods

Action-packed, Binge-Worthy, Challenging

For a while, tigers roamed Korea, garnering fear and respect, as the clawed creature resembled the peninsula. However, tigers roam no more due to Japanese occupation in the early 20th century. The Tiger: An Old Hunter’s Tale takes these historical facts to create a thrilling adventure drama– where man versus the titular beast are compelled to meet again due to political pressure, the government bounty, and personal revenge on both parties. The CGI is occasionally spotty, and the relationship between father and son isn’t as developed as the one between hunter and tiger, but the face-off between the opponents and their shared history makes The Tiger a good movie to watch.

50. Stree (2018)

7.2

Genres

Comedy, Horror

Director

Amar Kaushik

Actors

Aakash Dabhade, Abhishek Banerjee, Amar Kaushik, Aparshakti Khurana

Moods

Funny, Quirky, Suspenseful

You know how, instead of condemning sexual violence, some people patronizingly advise women to go home early, move in groups for safety, and make sure to lock the door for safety? Stree takes this usual advice and uses it instead as fictional ritual practices for the men in the small town of Chanderi to escape from the titular spirit. It’s a rather cheeky inversion, one that resolves in a familiar, though understandable, way. While Stree takes a more comedic, jumpscare approach, it does rightly point out that if half of the population acted like this spirit, then the fear the other half feels would undeniably be reasonable.

Comments

T
The Web Lion

On our tv, you stop the film by pressing OK on the remote, scroll down to set subtitles OFF, then press BACK/EXIT, then press OK to continue the film. I kept skipping the BACK EXIT step and thought it was not working. But this works.

A
Anonymous

Glad to get this list …I did see Barbara and liked it. I don’t find it at all easy to weed out a good foreign fiim anymore via Amazon somehow it’s changed and not better.
Drives me crazy also is that it’s crazy making, trying to turn OFF the subtitles when watching a movie
that is made in English. It doesn’t work, how they/say to do it.

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