16 International Movies To Stream On Amazon Prime Video

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1.Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000)

Country: South Korea

Language: Korean

In anticipation of his new film Mickey 17, let's revisit Bong Joon-ho's debut feature, shall we? The acclaimed South Korean director, who would go on to make one of the greatest films to ever win Best Picture, started on a modest scale with this dark comedy about a down-on-his-luck academic who is so irritated by the sound of barking dogs in his apartment complex, that he begins kidnapping and killing each one. Listen, I said it was a dark comedy.

While the film was a big box-office flop, making less than $50,000 worldwide on a budget of around $800,000, it is regarded as one of the most audacious directorial debuts of the century, with critic David Rooney noting upon its release that the "original, technically snappy comedy [...] becomes a little wild and hysterical at times but remains amusing thanks to its anarchic spirit and keen observation of the quirks of human behavior."

Watch it on Prime Video.

2.Love in the Time of Hysteria (1991)

Country: Mexico

Language: Spanish

While we're on the topic of directorial debuts, what if I told you that Alfonso Cuarón's (Gravity, Children of Men, Y Tu Mamá También) very first solo feature was also a dark, screwball comedy, and is available to stream on Prime Video? Much like Barking Dogs Never Bite, the logline for Solo Con Tu Pareja — or Love in the Time of Hysteria — is a bit... yikes, but you do have to appreciate a visionary who can come out swinging like this. In it, a Mexico City bachelor with a very active sex life sleeps with a nurse who, in retaliation for his playboy antics, alters his blood test results to make him think he is H.I.V.-positive.

In his 2006 review of the belatedly released film, which was banned in Mexico for many years due to its controversial content, A.O. Scott wrote, "It is hard not to admire the younger [Cuarón's] cheeky self-confidence, and hard not to enjoy the dexterity of his camera movements and the flair with which he attempts both low comedy and high melodrama."

Watch it on Prime Video.

3.Collective (2020)

Country: Romania

Language: Romanian

Nominated for two Oscars, including Best International Feature Film (Romania) and Best Documentary Feature, this powerful journalistic document about a deadly 2015 fire at a Bucharest club and the shocking injustices it revealed, packs so many twists and turns you might momentarily forget you're not watching a Hollywood thriller. That would be relief. But unfortunately, the horrors in the film — which include a death toll of 37 under the supervision of hospital workers — are a very real and direct consequence of the country’s corrupt medical system.  Disturbing revelations, such as a medical supplier knowingly diluting the disinfectant provided to facilities housing burn victims, depressingly inspired very few overhauls in the immediate aftermath of the film. Nonetheless, it is regarded as one of the greatest journalism movies of all time, and if you haven't already had a chance to dig into this doc, I urge you to do so and discover why.

Watch it on Prime Video.

4.Millennium Actress (2001)

Country: Japan

Language: Japanese

Ranked among the best 30 movies of the 2000s by IndieWire, the late Satoshi Kon's second of four feature films is an enduring anime classic. Interestingly, it shares more than a few things in common with another stateside cult-classic Mulholland Drive, which was released the same year. Namely: It centers around a screen actress, and uses the blurring of dreams and reality to great, and occasionally disorienting, effect. Unlike the Lynch film, though, its protagonist — Chiyoko Fujiwara, inspired by many real-life Japanese stars, including Setsuko Hara — has retired, and a documentary crew following her around allows us access into her past and present. A love letter to Japanese cinema if there ever was one!

Watch it on Prime Video.

5.Ida (2013)

Country: Poland

Language: Polish, French, Latin

Let's make some noise for 80-minute movies! Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, might be slender but it definitely isn't slight. "Within its relatively brief duration and its narrow black-and-white frames, the movie somehow contains a cosmos of guilt, violence and pain," A.O. Scott wrote in his original review of the film. The unforgettable road movie takes place in '60s Poland and follows a novice nun as she discovers from her only surviving relative that she was born to a Jewish family and her real name is Ida. The film wound up taking home the trophy for (the then-named) Best Foreign Language Film of the Year at the Oscars, and rightfully nabbed a nomination for its achievement in cinematography, too.

Watch it on Prime Video.

6.Cold War (2018)

Country: Poland

Language: Polish, French

It was hard to deny Pawel Pawlikowski had really arrived when he followed up Ida with this (also black-and-white) knockout film. Reteaming with his award-winning cinematographer Lukasz Zal, Pawlikowski delivered a bleak love story (inspired by the story of his own parents) stretching across multiple decades beginning in late-'40s post-war Poland. He once again managed to pack a cosmos into a sub-90 minute film, while still giving the story space to breathe. Unsurprisingly, this magic trick of filmmaking faired even better than Ida at the Oscars, securing three nominations, including Directing.

Watch it on Prime Video.

7.The Handmaiden (2016)

Country: South Korea

Language: Korean, Japanese

Three years before Parasite, another South Korean film managed to break through to stateside audiences in a big way. That surprising crowdpleaser, directed by auteur Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Decision to Leave), was The Handmaiden — an erotic thriller set in '30s Korea about a pickpocket hired as a handmaiden to a Japanese heiress. "Twisted" is a word that comes up in nearly every review of the film, used affectionately to describe both Park Chan-wook nihilistic worldview and the many tangled plots (complimentary) at work.

Watch it on Prime Video.

8.All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001)

Country: Japan

Language: Japanese

Clocking in at almost 2.5 hours, it's safe to say this is no Pawel Pawlikowski film. Shunji Iwai's coming-of-age story about a 14 year-old Tokyo boy who is obsessed with the fictional pop idol Lily Chou-Chou is also, by contrast, fascinatingly polarizing. In 2002, critics remarked that the film was too "murky," "frustratingly opaque," "convoluted," and "meandering." And yet, decades later, it has found new appreciation and wound up on several "best of" lists (including IndieWire's, whose original review was mixed at best).

Not unlike the recent film I Saw the TV Glow, Lily Chou-Chou seems interested in examining the ways in which otherwise lonely and isolated people can find a sense of community through fandoms. And while the blissful depictions of online anonymity don't exactly hold up too well in our age of surveillance capitalism, it's clear that this film offers much more than originally met the eye.

Watch it on Prime Video.

9.Shoplifters (2018)

Country: Japan

Language: Japanese

This Palme d’Or winner (and Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee!) from Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda follows a group of big-hearted scam artists existing together on society's fringes and will probably make you rethink the conventional notion of "family." Life-affirming, slow-burning, and tear-jerking —  Shoplifters was named one of the very best films of the 21st century by The Hollywood Reporter. Then again, at least a dozen other films from the prolific director could have easily found their way onto this list, so this is a very good streaming rabbit hole to fall down if you find yourself craving more sympathetic portraits of deeply flawed people.

Watch it on Prime Video.

10.Another Round (2020)

Country: Denmark

Language: Danish

Every awards season, Oscar prognosticators remind us to save a slot in the Best Director category for an international auteur. Thomas Vinterberg — the Danish filmmaker who earned one of the most surprising nods in recent memory for Another Round — is a big reason for that.

Perhaps best known stateside for directing The Hunt prior to this film, Vinterberg darkhorsed his way into the category, upsetting assumed frontrunners Aaron Sorkin (The Trial of the Chicago 7), Shaka King (Judas and the Black Messiah), and Darius Marder (Sound of Metal). Even with its Best International Feature Film win, this sneakily existential comedy about four middle-aged teachers who try maintaining a daily blood-alcohol concentration level of .5 to optimize their performance, has remained criminally underwatched. And believe me when I tell you, it's worth watching just for the culminating dance sequence of Mads Mikkelsen absolutely freaking it on the Copenhagen waterfront.

Watch it on Prime Video.

11.Dil Chahta Hai (2001)

Country: India

Language: Hindi

This Reality Bites-esque dramedy — which roughly translates to The Heart Desires — finds three aimless Indian Gen X graduates and best friends struggling to make sense of their lives amidst crushing cultural expectations. Farhan Akhtar’s film was praised upon release for its modern sensibility and continues to bubble back up in conversations involving "comfort-watches." Critic Siddhant Adlakha wrote glowingly of the influential Bollywood film, explaining that the movie "spawned an entire genre of Indian filmmaking" and "didn’t just change what kind of movies were made in the Indian mainstream, but how Indian teens and young adults lived and partied."

Watch it on Prime Video.

12.Les Misérables (2019)

Country: France

Language: French, English

It has been described as "something like [Victor] Hugo’s classic story remixed by The Wire and Training Day," and Do The Right Thing-ish for its "condensed timeline, multi-character story, [and] the inciting event of police violence followed by justifiable outrage." Which is to say: This tense film from Ladj Ly is probably worth seeing just so you can come up with your own apt film comparison. In it, we follow three undercover cops around a Parisian suburb while they carry out a 24-hour investigation. Impressively, Les Misérables was Ly's feature debut, and went on to receive the Jury Prize at Cannes and a Best International Feature Film nomination (which it lost to Parasite).

Watch it on Prime Video.

13.The Assassin (2015)

Country: Taiwan, China

Language: Mandarin

When the Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-Hsien — known for his subdued emotional landscapes, as in Cafe Lumiere — announced he'd be making a martial-arts film, there were some skeptics. How would his delicate sensibilities transfer to this adrenaline-fueled genre? It turns out there was no cause for concern. The skilled director was able to make something totally singular, incorporating his methodical touch and ravishing attention to detail in every frame. Justin Chang described The Assassin — which takes place in ninth-century China and follows a girl who, at 10 is kidnapped and trained to kill corrupt government officials – as "a mesmerizing slow burn [...] that boldly merges stasis and kinesis, turns momentum into abstraction, and achieves breathtaking new heights of compositional elegance."

Watch it on Prime Video.

14.Battle Royale (2001)

Country: Japan

Language: Japanese

Looking for something to double-feature with Hunger Games? How about the original Hunger Games: Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale. The Japanese action-thriller takes place in a dystopian near-future Japan, plagued with sky-high unemployment numbers and rampant crime. Meanwhile, the Japanese government has just shipped a bunch of ninth graders off to a remote island where they must fight to the death until there is only one "winner" standing. Impressed by the late director, who died just two years following its release, A. S. Hamrah remarked "That a 70-year-old man decided to make this parable of winner-take-all competition in a meritocratic society speaks to his inventiveness, his insight, or his hostility."

Watch it on Prime Video.

15.The Salesman (2016)

Country: Iran

Language: Persian

Perhaps you missed this foreign-language film submission from Iran when it was in theaters — but did catch some of the political controversy that surrounded it in media coverage. As a refresher: Its director Asghar Farhadi boycotted the Oscars ceremony following President Trump's first-term immigrant ban, so when the film won the Foreign Language category, a powerful statement was made in his stead. See for yourself the masterful command of cinema that earned this the big prize of the night and solidified Farhadi (The Past, A Separation) as one of the greatest working directors in the game.

Watch it on Prime Video.

16.A Hero (2022)

Country: Iran

Language: Persian

Two films later, Farhadi gave us this Grand Prix prize-winning moral fable — which, again, was shrouded in controversy. This time, for a plagiarism charge from one of Farhadi's former students. Had he been found guilty by the Iranian court, the decorated director could have faced penalties including forfeiting all profits from A Hero, as well as possible prison time. (After a two-year-long legal battle, Farhadi was finally cleared of legal charges.)

Strangely, the film A Hero has similar themes on its mind. It follows Rahim, an artist, who has been sent to jail for unpaid debt and is scrambling on his leave to pay back what is owed. Critic Glenn Kenny referred to the film as a "no-good-deed-goes-unpunished saga" which offers "a chilling demonstration of how, as the song says, money changes everything."

Watch it on Prime Video.

All these movies and more could be yours to watch for $8.99 per month when you subscribe to Prime Video, or you can sign up for Amazon Prime for $14.99 per month. Not so sure about a big commitment to a new streaming service? You can try out Prime Video free for 30 days (for new subscribers only).