BBC's 100 Greatest Foreign Language Films is a list compiled in 2018 by BBC Culture, as part of their annual critics' poll.[1] [2] [3]
BBC Culture polled 209 film critics from 43 countries, asking them to submit their list of the 10 greatest foreign-language movies (i.e. not in English). As with other BBC Culture 100 Greatest polls, the ranking was established by a point system: ten points awarded to the film ranked first, nine to the film ranked second and so forth.
Writing for Vanity Fair, K. Austin Collins lamented the predictability of the list - "heavy on works from Europe and East Asia; low on women; low on avant garde and documentary filmmaking" - and the absence of popular genres such as Nollywood, Bollywood or Giallo, arguing that "a truly worthy list of this nature wouldn’t be so snobby about high and low culture. It’d be a glorious, messy mix of arthouse and pop, as any list about the greatest art—rather than the greatest textbook art—should be."[4]
| 1 | Seven Samurai | Akira Kurosawa | Japan | Japanese | 1954 | |
| 2 | Bicycle Thieves | Vittorio De Sica | Italy | Italian | 1948 | |
| 3 | Tokyo Story | Yasujirō Ozu | Japan | Japanese | 1953 | |
| 4 | Rashomon | Akira Kurosawa | Japan | Japanese | 1950 | |
| 5 | The Rules of the Game | Jean Renoir | France | French | 1939 | |
| 6 | Persona | Ingmar Bergman | Sweden | Swedish | 1966 | |
| 7 | 8½ | Federico Fellini | Italy, France | Italian | 1963 | |
| 8 | The 400 Blows | François Truffaut | France | French | 1959 | |
| 9 | In the Mood for Love | Wong Kar-wai | Hong Kong, France | Cantonese | 2000 | |
| 10 | La Dolce Vita | Federico Fellini | Italy, France | Italian, English, French, German | 1960 |