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too much Googling will wear you out.” Yet one list, published on Wednesday, got me going at once, and the results are below. The list in question is “The 50 Best Foreign Language Movies Of the 21st Century So Far.” I found myself in instant disagreement with most of the titles included, and before I even realized it, nearly in the time that it took to type flat-out, I filled half a page with my first thirty-two selections. It took a little longer to come up with the remaining eighteen, though I think that the time difference reflects not the latter films’ lesser quality but, rather, simply the accidents of memory—which is to say that, although my list is randomly ordered (except for the first film on it, the best of the century so far), if it were to be ranked, some of the latecomers would be near the top. (The rule is: no more than one film per director.)

In any case, the old caveats apply—my list, of course, is based on the films I’ve seen, and needless to say I haven’t seen every foreign-language film of the century. The films I’ve included are ones that I come back to, whether in viewing or in mind, with love and wonder. The reason to publish the list is to resurrect pleasures from oblivion; reminding myself of the movies that have moved and amazed me. I hope they’ll have the same effect on you. Any principle in their selection is after the fact, but I notice a common theme: the movies I’ve included tend to wrangle with the art of the movies, why the art over all matters to a particular filmmaker regarding a particular subject, and how the filmmakers reconfigure the art to meet their needs and those of the subject.

I notice a preponderance of French-language movies made by French, Swiss, and Belgian directors, and I don’t think it’s either a coincidence or a prejudice: France is the cinematic country par excellence, the one where the cinema was christened (in 1911) the “seventh art,” the one where the history of cinema was born (with Henri Langlois’s film collection, in the early nineteen-thirties, and his subsequent founding of the Cinémathèque Française with Georges Franju and Jean Mitry in 1936), the one where, with the discerning and bold young writers of Cahiers du Cinéma, the director was recognized as the artist of movies, and the young critics who understood this soon became the directors—those of the New Wave—to prove the point. It’s also the country where the tradition of its modern classics continues unbroken, with most of the crucial New Wave filmmakers living and working into the new century and Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda happily still working even now. (Also, two American filmmakers are on the list, with films—one, a short—that were made in French.)

Ultimately, the movies on the list point forward to the future of the art, even if some of that future has already slipped into the past. The Chinese cinema has experienced, in this century, an outpouring of creative energy, thanks to the films of Jia Zhangke and other independent filmmakers there. I hope that the independent Chinese cinema will survive the government’s current wave of censorship and repression. In the Portuguese cinema, the baton has passed from Manoel de Oliveira and João César Monteiro to Pedro Costa and Miguel

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