A Guide—With Predictions!—To the Best International Films at the 2023 Oscars

Felix Kammerer in All Quiet on the Western Front streaming on Netflix now.
Felix Kammerer in All Quiet on the Western Front, streaming on Netflix now.Photo: Netflix

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What’s the most interesting Oscar category? Easy: international feature film, where winners tend to hold up better in retrospect than their best-picture counterparts (compare Drive My Car to Coda, say, or Roma to Green Book) and where 2019’s Parasite proved that a foreign language film could capture the zeitgeist better than anything from Hollywood—and take the biggest prize. For whatever reason, the Academy rarely gets this category wrong, and increasingly, with a globalizing film industry and an uncertain American indie market, foreign nominees feel like the most urgent titles on the slate. This year’s nominees are particularly good—and I’d argue they make a case for awards season more capably than the wild and wooly 10 nominees for best picture do.

You should seek out all five—because you won’t find a better set of films at the Oscars. Here’s a guide, with a prediction or two thrown in.

The Front-Runner: All Quiet on the Western Front

With nine Oscar nominations—including one for best picture (and a haul of BAFTA nods as well)—this German adaptation of the classic 1929 anti-war novel is gaining steam and is widely considered the favorite to win (at least) the international-feature prize. Directed by Edward Berger, it is a bludgeoning, joltingly beautiful war film that plunges you into the noise, mud, and bloodshed of trench warfare and leaves no ambiguity about the futility of it all. On the one hand, it’s two and a half hours of death and destruction. On the other, it’s right there on Netflix and is made with such technical skill, such expert pacing and moments of astonishing stillness, that you can’t help but be mesmerized. The German actors hold the horror of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel on their stricken faces—especially Felix Kammerer as Paul, the soldier whose innocence is quickly taken from him by combat. It’s a film of brute force and uncommon beauty. 

The Dark Horse: Close

If an upset is in the works, I wonder if Close, a simmering, painful movie about boyhood and friendship and love, might sneak away with the prize. A story about two 13-year-olds in the Belgian countryside whose close bond is tested by the cruel and homophobic dynamics of school, Close, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, comes from director Lukas Dhont, whose first movie (Girl, about a transgender teenager) garnered raves as well as some controversy. This one too has proved divisive with some critics complaining about a plot turn midway through the movie that drastically changes the emotional stakes. Not me: I found it only elevated Dhont’s story into a drama of tragic proportions. Close is beautiful to look at and has moments of pure, piercing sadness that are impossible to shake. This one has recently opened in select theaters and is expanding to more this weekend. 

The Crowd-Pleaser: Argentina, 1985

Everyone loves a rousing courtroom drama, and until Aaron Sorkin serves us another, we should treat ourselves to this handsome and well-crafted morality tale from director Santiago Mitre, which is now streaming on Prime Video. Recounting the true-life court case against leaders of Argentina’s brutal military junta, Argentina, 1985 is a history lesson that benefits from the avuncular stylings of the prosecutor Julio Strassera, played by Ricardo Darín, who gives his character a natty dignity and offhand wit. Though set up to fail by the Argentinian government, Strassera recruits a gang of youthful legal aides and mounts an underdog case against the military elite that gains national attention. The film is not complicated—it is a David-and-Goliath story with moments of high melodrama—and yet the production design is wonderfully atmospheric and the testimonies of ordinary Argentinians who recount abductions, torture, and worse land with force. In Mitre’s capable hands, the outcome of the trial, while never in doubt, is nonetheless wreathed in suspense. 

The One You Probably Haven’t Heard Of (But Will Love): The Quiet Girl

A small, achingly emotional Irish film, based on the story “Foster” by Claire Keegan, that had the briefest of releases in December and will roll out to national cinemas later this month, The Quiet Girl is about a nine-year-old named Cait who is off-loaded by her neglectful parents onto nearby relatives for a summer in the Irish countryside. It’s a simple story about neglect and loneliness and reticent need, but it swells with feeling and somehow never tips into maudlin sweetness. The young star Catherine Clinch holds an entire world in her mute, expressive face, and the middle-aged couple who looks after her (played by Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett) channels an incredible compassion even as they are hemmed in by circumstance and family obligation. I defy you not to be moved to tears by the end. 

The (Wonderfully) Weird One: EO

There is always at least one nominee that keeps the niche, art-house, for-cinephiles-only spirit of this category alive, and this year it’s most definitely EO by the octogenarian Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski. Striking and impressionistic (and under 90 minutes), EO is the luminously sad story of a donkey whose life is subject to the brutal whims, and glancing kindnesses, of the humans it crosses paths with. It is perhaps a cruel twist of fate that this awards season, EO has already been upstaged by another donkey—that would be Jenny from the best-picture nominee The Banshees of Inisherin—but there is room in our hearts for many dear but ill-fated animals. This film, which is playing in select theaters, is operatic and episodic and a little bit strange. It makes a case for the fundamental morality and separateness of animal-kind. I never quite knew what I was watching, but I was absorbed and then pummeled by sadness at the end.