20 Foreign Language Movies You Must See Before You Die
16. The Great Beauty
Country: Italy.
Plot: A writer in his 60s who has lived an empty existence for decades reflects on his life.
This art-house drama is very much a spiritual successor to the aforementioned La Dolce Vita. It's another film about a man walking around a city and contemplating his materialistic existence, so it feels like quite a traditional European art-house flick in many ways.
Nevertheless, The Great Beauty is completely brilliant. It's absolutely exquisite on a visual level and it tells a wonderfully heartfelt story as well, which is anchored by a fantastic lead performance from Toni Servillo, so even though the ingredients are somewhat familiar, The Great Beauty deploys them with so much skill that they feel entirely fresh.
A long and slow-paced film, The Great Beauty is rather self-indulgent but when the material is this great it's hard to care, since more of this cinematic awesomeness is never a bad thing. It also won a highly-deserved Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2014.