100 Most Popular Foreign-Language Films of 2019

Our year in review party . A different list each day! Here's Nathaniel R...

With Parasite sucking up so much awards oxygen, it's easy to let the good news slip by that it was hardly the only great film out there that played with subtitles. Pedro Almodóvar and Zhang Yimou's return to triumphant form (and box office success) with Pain & Glory and Shadow, respectively, were just two of many other goodies that delighted cinephiles and critics at movie theaters and festivals this year. 

Yes, it's time for our annual look back at international non-English language fare in cinemas. [For comparisons sake here are the lists from 2018, 2017 and 2016] For the purposes of the following list we skipped documentaries and animated films to keep the list more focused (and avoid arguments about dubbed versions or whatnot). Please note: This list does not include Portrait of a Lady on Fire since it's not getting a proper release until 2020. It made a very strong $118k in its Qualifying Week before getting pulled.

TOP 100 FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILMS OF 2019
Domestic Box Office Grosses Only - Figures as of March 12th, 2020
🔺= still in theaters | ★ = TFE recommends

01 ★🔺 Parasite (Neon, South Korea, October 11th) $53.1
Bong Joon-ho's Palme D'Or winner took American arthouse theaters by storm and expanded beautifully through word of mouth and aggressive smart publicity from Neon, making it the biggest foreign hit in the States since Hero (2002/2004)...

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Black American Film in 2019

Our Year in Review continues...

by Kyndall Cunningham

It’s hard to summarize the past year in Black American film as smoothly as I could if I was doing so at the end of 2018. It wasn’t just that this year’s most notable critical darlings failed to strike an emotional chord with Black audiences in comparison to recent years. There was also a lot of intense, misguided discourse online about the year’s most highly anticipated studio films like Harriet and Queen & Slim. The best of this year's crop - Fast Color, Luce and Little Woods - flew under the radar due to limited distribution and marketing. Even Jordan Peele’s ambitious Get Out follow-up Us, which was a huge hit, left a lot of people confused about its meaning. Needless to say, it was an interesting way to cap off a decade that slowly gave a new class of Black artists the freedom to make the movies they wanted without catering to a white lens. 

**This is not a comprehensive selection of films**

The Internet’s disdain for last year’s Green Book spurred many conversations about white filmmakers’ ability to accurately portray Black people in their art. So it was interesting that, once again, this year’s most highly acclaimed and talked about Black movies out of prestige festivals were written and directed by white men: Trey Edward Shults’ Waves, Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco and Craig Brewer’s Dolemite is My Name...

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Year in Review: Horror Actoring of 2019

by Jason Adams

Since it's the second to last day of 2019 and we already named our "10 Favorite Horror Actresses of 2019" last week I figured I'd give us a last second bonus and shed some affection on the best fellas of the year. I know, I know, we're all all more inclined towards favoring the actresses... well, so's the genre to be frank. Horror really does favor female stories and experiences, and it was I will admit much easier to come up with last week's list. Besides the magnificent duo that anchors my favorite movie of the year I had to dig a little deeper for this one. But once I began rifling around I managed to uncover some gems...

Willem Dafoe & Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse 

When forced to choose between the two (and no thanks to Awards Season I have had to here and there) I tend to choose Dafoe, but only because his magnificent to-the-moon work is more straightforward... as straightforward as anything is in this topsy-turvy madhouse of a movie, at least. Pattinson's work is trickier -- his accent and behavior is all supposed to be wobbly, as his character's unformed; a liar trying to pour himself into a new shape. But make no mistake these are the two best male performances of 2019 slapping against each other in slippery tandem.

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President Cinephile

It's hard not to miss President Obama on a public daily basis these past few years given the current hellscape but it's especially hard to not miss him on a personal level when he reminds us that he is genuinely into cinema. I mean how many US Presidents would even see movies that don't even crack a million at the box office like Transit and Diane, and movies from other countries and all genres. And the rest of his list: Atlantics, Parasite, Booksmart... The good taste!

Next up are my favorite movies and TV shows of 2019. Of course, there’s also American Factory, a film from our own production company, Higher Ground, that was recently shortlisted for an Oscar. Here’s the full list: pic.twitter.com/PEcgwotcxm

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) December 29, 2019

We also had to draw attention to a few official responses from those included...

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Year in Review: Special Interest Box Office, 7 Categories

Our year in review party continues. Different lists each day. Here's Nathaniel R

We intended to kick off this list of "niche" box office categories with a list of the top grossers that were made for very little money but budget figures are hard to come by (consistently that is) and often difficult to parse. Is publicity and adveristing included? Back when I first started becoming interested in movies I was reading somewhere that a movie needed to make about 2.5 times its budget to break even. Who knows if that general rule is still accurate these days when the finances of the movie industry have shifted so dramatically and films often use their theatrical run as more of a commercial for their other runs (streaming, bluray, tv rights, etcetera). 

But let it suffice to say that some movies made on the cheap made their investors very happy this year. Parasite, so far as we can gather, was made for about $11 million and its worldwide tally is at $161 million and still rising. It's already the 8th highest grossing Palme d'Or winner ever. That's a major success by any metric.

Elsewhere in crazy return on investment horror movies continue to be a safe investment, even the ambitious ones...

Now, on to 7 more concrete box office lists. What follows are top hits in interesting subcategories like "female director, "lgbtq films" and more. We tried our best to collect accurate data but we apologize in advance for any unintentional stumbles in these underrecorded/underdiscussed areas of moviemaking. It's also worth noting that for reasons we aren't quite sure about almost all US box office sites include Canadian figures (without any differentiation). We know for example that Xavier Dolan's latest didn't open in the US but it's included in all box office reports so we're including it here. This is also presumably why Bollywood films always report higher grosses than we expect, given their total lack of media coverage in the States, since Canadian figures are included.

(Figures below are as of March 12th, 2020) 

TOP GROSSING FILMS THAT NEVER WENT INTO WIDE RELEASE IN THE US
We count 800 theaters as "wide" though some sites draw that line at 600 screens. 

Last Black Man in San Francisco

01 No Manches Frida 2 (Pantelion, March 15th) $9.2 March 15th (472 screens)
02 Apollo 11 (Neon, March 1st) $9.0 (588 screens)
03 The Dead Don't Die (Focus) $6.5 (690 screens)
04 The Wandering Earth (CMC. Feb 5th) $5.8 (129 screens)
05 Gully Boy (Viva Pictures, Feb 14th) $5.5  (270 screens)
06 The Mustang (Focus. March 15th) $5.0 (527screens)...

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